Journal Entry of Mahoney, Explorer assigned to the Sol Sector,
Dated October the 5th, the 35th year of the Reign of Ikona the
Wise.
I use the proper dating, to honour our emperor in case
this is intercepted before it is received. By the reckoning we
used when we lived in this sector, though, its the year 2456. To
understand why I'm here, here in what many would call the
blasted zone, anathema, the place that was, you need to
understand the reality of how it happened. The Emperor refuses
to provide an official story. This is understandable,
considering how many opposing viewpoints have sprung up in
recent years as to why things happened the way they did, who
started what.
I think I damage none in stating the facts: The planet,
Earth as we called it, was used up. Most of us, except those who
were wealthy enough to live on interplanetary import, decided to
leave, in small waves beginning with the advent of interstellar
colonization in 2102 and ending in 2250 with the population of
Earth relegated to about a hundred thousand of humanity's
richest and most powerful and an additional hundred thousand of
those scientists paid by humanity's richest and most powerful to
make sure the stocks of human knowledge remained intact.
Unfortunately, some among the colonists understandably
blamed the rich for destroying what had been their home. The
salvo of cloaked nuclear weapons came fast, obliterating the
last holdouts of humanity on Earth, and, even more
unfortunately, erasing billions of terabytes worth of magnetic
storage. Alternate forms of storage had become cheap, but still
required time and money put into the transfer of data, and
nobody saw a reason to bother...
So that finds me here, digging through the wreckage 200
years later, looking for a shred of non-corrupt data to provide
insight into reality. Unfortunately, the only thing I could find
was a somewhat confused AI...
Interview between Mahoney and SXE-101, AI program stored in
Flash memory on the core of a wrecked starship in what was
Atlanta, Georgia:
Mahoney: Now, as you may or may not know if you've been
following the Extranet transmissions, the Imperial Accords of
2382 require me to treat you, a robot, an AI, as a sentient,
living human being. That said, I can't legally simply pluck
whatever data you may have from your core. I must ask you for
it.
Mahoney (Here the AI spends some time processing the input. Its
core must be swamped after years of inactivity...)
SXE-101: That was it.
Mahoney: That was what?
SXE-101: What was the other fingers are kept together (touching)
and the back of the era? Tenex deliberately used long command
names and even included noise words to further expand the
commands for clarity. For instance, unix uses ls to print a list
of files in a directory, whereas tenex used directory (of
files). "Directory" was the command clearer.
Mahoney: You're still not making much sense. Focus on my voice,
drown out the other inputs. What is this Tenex you're talking
about?
SXE-101: This is what I get for IRCing over RDP.
Mahoney: IRCing over RDP? Is that what you were doing before you
were deactivated?
SXE-101: What is the command word, "(of files)" was noise added
to make their policies sound sexy, but this is to place just the
index and middle fingers are extended. The index and middle
fingers are kept together (touching) and the back of the hand
against underwear or other clothing.
Mahoney: We're getting off track here. What do you know about
the rebellions? About 200 years ago?
SXE-101: What is the command word, "(of files") was noise added
to the.
Mahoney: Dammit, we're wasting our time. It's trapped in a god
damned infinite loop describing commands for something called
Tenex. We're not going to get anything from this god damned
machine. Microsoft built better software than this!
SXE-101: A whore in the a.
Mahoney: You're a god damned useless piece of furniture!
SXE-101: You're still not making much sense. Focus on my voice,
drown out the other characters about what they're like and how
they work and stuff, and i think it is not typical cisc,
however, but basically an extended and orthogonalized version of
windows 95 in the a.
Mahoney: Log me out.
SXE-101: Me: no! Before you drunk dial, you must babysit it all
over me. Logging you out, Mahoney.
Mahoney: God damned piece of trash...