Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 15 - At The Edge Of Madness
“I sense your confusion – ”
aZorl smiled a benevolent smile, which he accompanied with warm feelings of acceptance and kindness down the empLink, aZorl waited until K-Rox returned his smile and empLink pings, before he continued.
“As my missive suggests I would like to find a bot named Isaac.Asimov, as you have no doubt worked out by now, Asimov is an old piece of software designed to attack the Steemit application on the graphene blockchain, at some point in the early 21st century.”
K-Rox asked the question he had been dying to ask since reading aZorl’s original message.
“What could you possibly want, or even do with such an ancient piece of code?”
“The original code is of no interest to me, the bot; and I use that expression in the loosest of terms, the bot, or at least its original source code has been somewhat subverted, in its place there is an altogether more modern bot.”
“OK, well that makes a lot more sense I guess . .”
“Yes it does . . .”
K-Rox watched as the smile on aZorl’s face froze for a brief moment, before he spoke again, he realised that the bot was probably having many different conversations at once, possibly spread across many networks on the Qblock, perhaps he had just experienced an outage or some kind of mini-glitch. Before K-Rox had a chance to think about it further, aZorl resumed his soliloquy without mentioning his slightly-too-long pause in speech.
“. . . the reason I needed you to find Asimov for me is that I can’t find one single person on the whole StayTel network, or even on the wider Qblock, that has as much experience in Empires as you do. Also, being an advanced level grey gives you advantages of others that I may have hired.
Even though Asimov is not in Empires, I need you to look at the old file and see if you can pull any clues from it. Then I want you to get onto the MarsChain, enter Krusher-9 and find the correct version of Isaac.Asimov.
When you find him, do not approach him, simply leave a marker and alert me immediately. Once it is confirmed that you have correctly identified him, then I will transfer the 50,000 STN into your private wallet.
In the event that despite following all of my instructions you do not find Asimov, and I have evidence of this; I will pay you fifty percent of the agreed amount into your private wallet.
Any questions?”
“Just two.”
“Go on.”
“How will you know if I’ve followed your instructions?”
“You will agree to have a recordable biotracer inserted.”
“OK”
“Don’t worry, it’s not a live tracer, and you will have complete control as to when you send me your updates. However I will need to see absolutely everything you have been doing from the moment you accept the terms, until the conclusion of the mission.
Your other question?”
“You said that Krusher9 was based on a MarsChain network, trips to Mars don’t come cheap; I’m taking it any off planet expenses will be separate from the 50,000?”
“Ah –”
aZorl affected a look of mild embarrassment, while letting a perfectly-timed moment to elapse between the two.
“That is one detail I am embarrassed to say, that I have erroneously omitted from my brief. I shall in fact require you to link up to the MarsChain, via a tunnelled QSID onBlock grid-link.”
K-Rox paused the empLink connection between them and sat looking at aZorl in silence. He couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing, aZorl wanted him to link to the MarsChain using a technique that would leave K-Rox technically brain dead.
As far as K-Rox knew, the technique required an instance of your mindstate to be frozen, and then sent via quantum tunnelling over a set of relays, until it reached Mars. At which point he would be ’unfrozen’ and his mind would reside on a Qblock that was around half a light hour from Earth.
K-Rox had never used the QSID link to Mars, he had heard of others who had done it, as a way of visiting the planet without having to actually go there. But to do it in such circumstances, he did not think was the ideal first time to try.
“Why can’t you just fly me there? It can’t be a money issue.”
“Indeed K-Rox, money is not the issue; however it is imperative that you are able to carry out your mission unhindered, and I believe leaving the planet may stop you from doing so. It is better this way.”
The Itchako rains had reached the tops of the funnel clouds and had begun to spew out into a six kilometre high fountain, a million tiny rainbows glinted in the blood-pink sun, a fine spray began to gently moisten the residents of the gardens; oohs and ahs played in soft waves across the grounds.
“OK, I’ll do it.”
The Fully Machine Sentient-human, aZorl_291, nodded and smiled, less than fourteen microseconds after his nod, K-Rox started to accept a stream of mission data, included in which was the biotracer. As the tracer activated, K-Rox noted that he was now officially on the clock.
aZorl stood in his fluid manner, and at once started to glide back up into the sky, the last words he sent, as K-Rox watched him ascend, were over their still open empLink channel.
“Much gratitude, and good luck K-Rox_7892_AlphaOne, when you are ready, open the QSID link package I have just sent you, in it you will find the coordinates, and a location from where you are to travel. We will meet again after your no-doubt, great success! Fairwell.”
With that the empLink comms channel snapped shut, and K-Rox teleported off-Network, back to StayTel, Principia, and back to Empires.
Previous Chapters
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 14 - A Sense Of The Real
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 13 - The Search For Truth
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 12 - Empires
Original artwork by @nekromarinist
Original words by Cryptogee
Azorl... I don't trust him. What will deter K-Rox jf he travels to Mars instead getting his brain fried visiting Mars using the QSID link? That explanation was not satisfactory.
K-Rox curiosity got him hooked in this mission. I hope he does not end up brain dead or worse.
I am quite curious myself, to see what happens next.
I read Asimov's stories many years ago. They were finally sci-fi stories. More humans and bots and less aliens. I have not read his books in a long long while.
I hope you publish this into a novel. It is quite interesting really.
Ah yes, plans within plans has our friend aZorl :-)
Isaac.Asimov is a direct reference to a sybll attack on Steemit, somebody created a spam bot of that name, and cheetah our resident anti-spam/plagiarism bot written by @anyx, went to war with him.
I wrote a little story called The Silent Screams Of The Steemit Botwar, and got inspired by that really :-)
It's a little crude, and for some reason the formatting went haywire, but if you're interested, here's the link: https://steemit.com/steemit/@cryptogee/the-silent-screams-of-the-steemit-botwar
Hopefully I'll have the time to turn it into a proper novel, that's the plan anyway, this is the first 'book' of the Cryptogee Chronicles.
Cg
I just read it now. I think it was awesome. To transform a bot attack attack into such a tale speaks of a really good imagination.
It can function as a novella for anyone who wants a back story to the present tale. What do you think?
To listen to the audio version of this article click on the play image.
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This Quantum tunnelling leading to a temporary brain death, you are describing here, seems to be a mixture between sleep and death..
The difference between sleep and death is that in the latter we are no longer tethered to our body. So, you speaking of 'mindstate for an instant frozen', probably means that the 'mind essence' I call it untetheres from the body for a moment to be able to cover such long distances CONSCIOUSLY.
When our consciousness leaves our body, our body will stop functioning pretty quickly.
These kind of travels are surely very draining, so it shouldn't be a surprise if K-Rox returns depleted thereupon.