MINDLYFT (COMPLETE)

CHAPTER 24

I walked back to my LivPod in a daze. I had a lot to think about. What Wizard had just thrown at me was fascinating but it wasn't the most urgent matter. Still, maybe I could leverage his request to solve my other problems. Maybe if I helped him he would help me.

When I got back to my pod I did something I'd sworn never to do again. Something I hadn't done in years and wasn't even sure if I would remember how to do. Hack my ThinkingCap. A new one I had drone-delivered in the event I'd need it. Latest model, but to my relief, all the same vulnerabilities.

It took me about an hour and a half to reconfigure all the software and remove some hardware components that would only get in the way. Then I put it on my head and returned to Cyborg land. Aside from my brief introduction to Wizard's dragon while sitting in his VR chair, I hadn't been virtual since before they exiled me to GutterVille.

I chose a nice NetSphere cloud-world, with orange and pink glares, and floated out past Neptune and Uranus, toward the edge of our solar system, at many multiples the speed of light. I considered that light-speed barrier in real world physics and how easy it was to blast through it in the virtual world humans had created. One world had become indistinguishable from the other. The VR world always a component of human imagination. Our imaginations have no speed barrier while physical particles do. Perhaps that was the solution to our solar storm problem. And to stray asteroids too.

I considered the other aspects of the problem. The fact that Hinka and others had deliberately created a fake problem to serve their own ends. Maybe for everybody's sake, as they would say. After all, it had given me a job. Something to do, other than make clones and plot the overthrow of the government. Decades before they'd tried handing out money, but people became depressed. They had money but no purpose, and ended up spending it all on frivolous adventure and drugs. Then their unhappiness turned to anger at anyone who was happy, or did have purpose. They didn't know what they wanted. They just wanted chaos. So maybe make-work really was the best way to keep everyone busy. The problem now was that the work-makers had come to believe their own make-believe. They were single focused on defeating a figment of their own imagination. So much so that they were ignoring a real threat right in front of their virtual-noses.

If I was to solve the solar problem or even the fake asteroid problem, which indeed could one day be a real asteroid problem, then I'd need help. They had assigned twelve teams in the contract for a reason. This wasn't an easy fix. It would take the combined imagination of dozens of humans, the entire global computing capacity of Wizard, and billions of Bitty worth of hardware for testing various solutions, and finally implementing something, whatever that something might be. I couldn't do it alone.

So I broke down the components of my problem the same way I would a complex operating system design or program I was writing from scratch. Each segment had a role. Unto itself and for the bigger picture. Like the little wheels moving a large wheel in a fifteenth century clock.

Don't know why that image came into my mind but it did. From an old childhood EduUpload maybe.

The first and perhaps most critical component of this wheel would be convincing Hinka and her Chicago bosses to change course. That we were all dead if they didn't. I didn't think I could do it alone. Hinka already saw me as a rival and our last few conversations hadn't gone well. Too much animosity. She was likely to interpret anything I told her as a plot to unseat her, or at best just nonsense I was using to make myself seem smarter and more important than I was.

Before I could approach Hinka I'd have to convince Knowles. Knowles was being targeted by Hinka as my potential replacement, so if he was already on board with me, maybe the two of us together could help her see the light. Only problem was I'd just rejected Knowles and I knew he was already eyeing his new importance with Hinka. Worse still, putting him in charge of the Contract regulation and monitoring had somehow turned him into a robotic extension of the Contract. Reading that bureaucratic document had turned him into a bureaucrat. I think he might have even forgotten what the contract was written for in the first place. To him, everything on this project was the contract. It seemed he'd die happily, up until the end of the world, so long as nobody had done anything outside the contract terms. Pure insanity.