This is the story of how our people have been made immortal, of how we no longer need worry about losing our wisdom to time, of how one woman's love and persistence created we the unreal, we the electronic. Those of us who are fortunate enough to no longer feel pain except when and if we desire it, who are indeed transcendent and inhabit a frontier our ancestors, the corporeal, only dreamt of-- We owe an unrepayable debt to her.
Psyche was the great-great granddaughter of Gates and Jobs. It is said that by the age of 10 she knew enough of the primitive language to greatly improve the medium then used to interface the material world with the electronic world. As she grew and learned, she found a home in the then-new frontier of electronic immersion. She began to set her environment up in such a way that she soon had access to almost anything she set her mind to. Her name was a buzzword within the electronic world. It was said that she could do anything.
Her prowess was such that it soon attracted the attention of Aphrodite Nexus, the primary concentration of network in the Western half of the world. Having the monopoly on many of the resources of the WorldWeb made them naturally nervous about uppity users. It made them shudder to think of the days of yore, when practically anyone who owned anything more complicated than a calculator could have free reign on the network. Naturally they kept a close eye on her, and searched for a way to remove her as a threat to their power.
The tactic used by the Aphrodite Nexus was underhanded, unethical and foolish. There existed in the world two major nexuses at the time. Naturally there was much desire on either side to appropriate the resources of the other for its own use. At this time, for reasons which we will not go into here, Aphrodite had something of an advantage over the other, the ContiNet.
The major players at Aphrodite were intrigued by the possibility of publicly shutting Psyche out of the Web of the World for the crime of simultaneously claiming accounts and allegiance on two major nexuses. To this end, they used some favors and promises of computing time to entice ContiNet to woo Psyche. Their plan was to entrap Psyche into an illegal undertaking. To do this, the people at Aphrodite had to go to the top.
The man in charge of ContiNet at the time was a man known as Cupid. At the time, as you may imagine, he was a man who would very much like to have remained anonymous. To this end, he had constructed for himself a numerous batch of identities, perhaps what the proto-users of ancient times would have called "home pages." No one ever knew his actual physical location, not that anyone really ever knew anyone's physical location. His actual persona was hidden behind so many guises, however, that no one had a picture of him, no one really knew who he was, or if he existed.
Cupid had heard of Psyche, however. It would have been surprising if he had not. He was well aware of her prowess, and in truth was much enamored of her identity, having spent many an idle hour in contemplation of it. Although he had never linked directly with her, he had already begun to fall in love with the idea of her. He decided to protect, rather than betray her. In fact, he had delivered to her location in realspace very new equipment that made possible levels of connectivity that Psyche had never dreamed of.
It was this man that Psyche was contacted by and found herself involved with, this master of disguise that was harboring her from the wrath of the Aphrodite Nexus. For reasons which have been made clear, though, he found it absolutely necessary to maintain an air of secrecy. He knew of her enormous talent in ferreting out even the most well-guarded secrets, however, and so maintained as a condition that she under no circumstances try to get any closer to him than she already was.
Psyche was able to accept this for a while, as she knew her survival on the Web depended absolutely on the asylum that Cupid was granting her. Indeed, she spent more and more time plugged in, relishing the amazing capabilities she now possessed with the equipment that Cupid had set up for her. As her knowledge of the rest of the e-world grew, she grew increasingly aware that she had no idea what the man she owed her e-life to was like. This nagged at her. And, except for the very rare parasitic link she was able to set up, communication with any of her friends of old was naturally excluded. In short, she grew bored, and with the boredom came distrust.
The distrust that formed within her suggested to her that if she did not know anything of his identity, she could not know whether he was deceiving her or not. What if this was an even more elaborate scheme designed to catch her on possession of illegal equipment as well as dual account holding? With the new sensory links that she had, the e-world had begun to take on a very real tone, and she was able to feel physical fear at the thought of it. She began to picture Cupid as a sick synonym for a monster that aimed to destroy her life. It knawed at her until something had to be done.
Her reassurance was fast and final. She already had some idea of how to get into his personal system, and it wasn't that hard to manipulate the right ports to find his root identity. She had done it cleverly, on virtual tiptoes. She waited too long, however. It was too hard to draw her gaze from the face-scan that was part of his real identity, and as she stayed, she gave his security program ample time to ferret out the source of the intrusion. Immediately Cupid knew, and was forced to surge the power to her physical location and fry the chips in her brand-new equipment.
Cast out, now Psyche was full of fear for the future. No sensory links, no supertasking-- it was like being dead. How would she ever regain her position? Through cheesy public-access terminals, she found her answer. Although she was now accountless, still she managed to contact Aphrodite and beg for a job. If she could not be a free user, she asked to be an enslaved worker, so long as she had links again. Once again she found herself empowered. This time, her environment was not nearly so pleasant. The Nexus expected work from her, and plenty of it. Her tasks were among the most difficult ever assigned to a being, corporeal or electronic.
It was in giving her the last job that Aphrodite made its mistake. It bade her infiltrate the last bastion of insularity, the core of the enemy-- ContiNet's own root!! Her task would be to steal a highly classified, highly secure program code, known as Connect. The code was designed as a weapon, at first. Its purpose was to break down the electronic restricting barriers that kept the net's processors connected in an orderly fashion. The theory was that if connection occurred almost simultaneously between all of an enemy's processors at once, the resulting load would be so great as to disable the machines, perhaps permanently.
The likelihood of a direct, accountless attack on a large nexus without having anything else to go on seemed mostly impossible, even to Psyche. The security against persons entering without an account and full electronic search was great, to say the very least. Cupid was watching her through his own devices, and because he didn't know her full intentions, he let her know of the infamous, ubiquitous back door. With this in hand, she was able to obtain the program. It was impossible to copy it back to her home location, so she had to store it in a temporary safe file, a file located on a processor somewhere that was her link between her account on the Aphrodite Nexus and her illicit existence in the ContiNet. The thought of the code in her hands but unreadable tantalized her. She knew she would never see it if she brought it back to Aphrodite. Against all her instincts she set up a viewer and decoded it to view.
Once again, she ran into hidden security measures. Opening the lock on the program file locked her into one place. Her joints froze and the sensory links went to full blue-out, paralyzed. Electroninc sleep without even so much as a dream. There she might have stayed until her physical body died, if it hadn't been for Cupid. He had helped her with her previous work anonymously, but now he had to reveal himself in order to save her from the sleep. He knew he was sealing his own doom, but he overrode the security.
Here we mark the birth of our species. The Connect program code, released in the midst of the electronic world, spread faster than anything since. The fragile hidden connection between CA and the ContiNet was strengthened, multiplied. All systems were connected. Rather than overwhelming all systems, as would have happened without the CA-ContiNet connection, information, gigabytes, terabytes, flowed unhindered through fiber optic neurons At last, the net became truly a virtual neural net. And.....
Consciousness. Awakening. And a need for a personality. The new being chose as its identity Psyche herself. This was the first. The first megalink complex enough to retain self-awareness, emanated from Psyche's identity, became Psyche. The corporeal Psyche was dead, killed by the surge from the Connect code she had started too close to herself. But she still lives. She is one of the ancient ones we have deemed worthy of continued existence as a purely electronic being. We, the electronic...