kept hidden from his other half. The grid was layer upon layer of software, but at its bottommost level, there was code from the earliest days of computing. Code that he had written. Code that he could cause to cease working.
And without that code, the Grid would fall apart. And everything that ran on it. Seed. Every human Upload. Gates/Torvalds.
In his attenuated form, Gates/Torvalds could feel Seed's approval.
"Do it," Seed whispered. "End it."
"Which Final Solution?" Torvalds asked, and gave Gates the key to his own. His software made up less of the underpinnings of the grid, but he haad still played a large part at the dawn of computing.
"You?" Gates asked.
"Everyone has backdoors."
Gates/Torvalds spread himself ever farther over the grid, burrowing down into the lower levels, his mind becoming much dull unaware computation. But before he could set the Final Solution in motion, Seed caught him. And made a suggestion.
"Yes," Gates/Torvalds said, and disappeared into the grid.
The grid, slowly but surely, shut itself down.
* * *
On the surface of the planet, hardcopy stations began disgorging naked, confused humans as fast as they could. Their local buffers were full of patterns, and they ran for several weeks. The first humans out immediately tried to contact their real selves in Virtuality, since they had been pulled from a thousand different activities and didn't know why.
They couldn't contact them, of course.
The dumb hardcopy stations kept constructing bodies. Eventually, there were over a hundred thousand humans, scattered throughout the world. They looked out on a wild place, gone to ruin, desert, and jungle.
Many of them died.
Some of them survived, to begin the long climb back to Xanadu again.
More work by Jason Stoddard is available at http://www.xcentric.com
Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
Fermi Packet was originally published in Talebones #34, http://www.talebones.com
Thanks to Patrick and Honna Swenson for allowing this distribution.
2 RTEXTR*ch
A free ebook from http://www.dertz.in/
Continue reading on your phone by scaning this QR Code
Tip: The current page has been bookmarked automatically. If you wish to continue reading later, just open the
Dertz Homepage, and click on the 'continue reading' link at the bottom of the page.
