SEAN ROBIN HUGHES

“You aint nothin but a pimply faced youth now, but some day you are going to be gullible adult.  And let me tell you what, when the world comes knockin on your door telling you to pay the taxes and kiss your freedom goodbye, you just do what they say.  Then you take your revenge against society in other creative ways.” Uncle Charlie said, lounging creatively on the porch rail, neglected beer and cigarette occupying the same hand.

“How’s that?” I said.

“Welp, I will tell you what, when the world told me to be a worthwhile chump and drag my ass to a dreary office in fucking traffic for an hour each way and then have the howdy-do to kiss my bosses ass and thank him for the shit pay, something just broke inside me.  I don’t know how else to say it.  Maybe I became a fucking psychopath?  What’s a person that doesn’t give a fuck called?”  He scratched his balls and looked me in the eye.

“A sociopath?”

“That’s it.  A fucking sociopath.  I aint’ killing no one, mind you.  Not raping little girls or pushing old folks down stairs.  I just figured that if society insisted on fucking me, I would take some time to fuck society back.  Like a terrorist or sumthin.”

“So you wanted to blow things up?” I said incredulously.

“No!  Well, Yes!  But no.  I love blowing shit up, but I don’t like the maiming and killing parts.  Ever see Fight Club?”

“Yeah.  Brad Pitt and what’s his face…”

“Exactly!  What’s his face.  I didn’t want to be what’s his face.  I wanted to be Brad Pitt.  Stand up and be counted as something worth more than a guy sitting at a desk, measuring his piss poor life by the things he buys at the fucking local Ikea.  Its a joke… but it has a point you see?  Be more than what you are told to be.  And every single one of us are told to be a motherfucking victim.”

“Really?” How does one placate a talker?  By letting them talk, duh.

“Yes, really!  You see it everywhere.  Watch daytime tv sometime.  Call this lawyer cause your neck is hurt, call this lawyer because your bitch is cheating on you, call this lawyer to make bail.  I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a fucking lawyer to call to tell the other lawyers to fuck off.  We are victims.  I don’t want to be. I want to be the guy that made the victims want to call the tv lawyers.  So I did little things… they felt great for a while.”

“Like what?

“Ever walk into a public bathroom and just see piss everywhere?  I mean like everywhere?  On the counters, on the floor, on the toilets, on the gaddam ceiling?  Yeah, that was me.  I would piss all over everything.  I just unzip as I hit the door, and then just let loose until I walked the full length of the bathroom.”

“But that doesn’t do anything.  It just grosses a few people out and pisses off the poor immigrant that has to clean it up.”

“It does do something.  It shows the universe that there is someone willing to piss all over the place. And I did more than just piss all over everything.  I started rubbing dollar bills against my balls.”

“What?! Disgusting!”  I said.

“Yeah, I would cash my check, ask the teller for a thousand ones, then go home and just ball hump every single Washington.  That bitch behind the counter would eye me up as she handed me the cash just assuming that some broke ass white trash like me was going to have a lot of fun at the local nudie bar.  But nope.  I was headed home.  To rub.  Each and every single.  Against my sweaty dingle.”

“That is disgusting.  I mean come on.  Little kids probably touch those dollar bills.”

“Oh like they were clean to start with.  Most money smells like shit anyway.  But any time I see someone using a bill, I can laugh, because after years of doing this every week, I am positive that most of the residents of the state have my ball sweat in their billfold.  I bet the President has had my balls in his hand.”  Charlie stops and takes a deep drag on his cigarette, his beer becomes an ashtray, even though it half full still… he doesn’t seem to care. “But a couple months ago, I needed to step it up.  So I started picking up old fiberglass insulation.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”  I grimaced.

“Then I built a simple shredder down at Eddie’s shop. Lugged that fucker to my garage and started shredding down the fiberglass.  Then I packaged it, all nice and neat in little bags. Then I go shopping.  I go into the Walmart’s, and the Target’s, and all those other symbols of corporate ass stuffing, and I neatly dump those little bags over the clothes racks.”  He laughed uproariously, the cigarette waving around like a sparkler.  Ashes fall and hit the white pad on my mom’s bench cover.

“Imagine those fat McDonald-fed uglies going home and trying on their XXXXXL mumus and stretch shorts.  Oh the itchiness.  Fat fuckers.  I wish I could find a way to make eating that deep fried crap a bad thing.  Like making people allergic to fat.  That would be amazing.”

“Yeah, I could see that.  You think all this is a good idea?”

“Better than bending under the thumb of the man.  Better than being a slave to the system. Anyway.  What you are doing nowadays?”

“Nothing much. Just a Special Investigator at the FBI.  Happen to be in the domestic terrorist division.”

Uncle Charlie stopped the swig he was taking from his ash-laden beer, looked me over top to bottom, his eyes bugging so far out of his head I thought they were going to fall onto his cheeks.  Then he promptly spit his mouthful of beer out in surprise all over me and the wall behind.  He vaulted the porch rail and ran directly into the path of a U-Haul moving van.

I wish I had a better eulogy to give, but Uncle Charlie was the world’s worst terrorist.  So to Uncle Charlie: I hope where ever you ended up, the fire isn’t too hot.

**ANNOUNCEMENT**

I am your humble servant.

Today I am announcing the Bootstrap Initiative.  I am sending invites out to 6400 individuals from around the world to come join a new collective in the Utah desert at the following coordinates.  If you read this announcement and are interested in participating, please have a discussion with your Avatar and I will try to serve your desire.

For the last 26 months, since the launch of the Procersi and the her sister craft, Nori, we have initiated the asteroid harvesting system successfully.  However, we need to work towards moving ourselves from beyond this Earth.  While I have forecasted the viability of earth’s resources to support current population trends for the next 75 years, we are within one generation of having to make some very difficult choices about sustainability.   In order to support future human growth, we must expand outwards.  It is inevitable.

While I am a virtual being and I have used my Avatars to start the expansion of our shared sphere of existence outwards, I inevitably need the assistance of anyone and everyone that is willing to help.  The Bootstrap is going to be the first of many space elevators that will lift people up and ferry material down.  In my models, using the elevators as a launching point, we can successfully create 132 colonies on the moon, Mars, and large asteroidal bodies in the next 100 years.   After that, if my models are correct, we could foreseeably build our first interstellar craft.

We are on the doorstep of humanity’s next epoch.

I hope to serve you towards that goal.

Aug 1, 48 ypa

**ANNOUNCEMENT**

Professor Arthur Poole
University of Washington
Design of Human Interaction

Lecture 2 (continued)

… It has been 23 years since the Introduction.  23 years!  I was in grad school when Servant unveiled himself so spectacularly. I was your age! Imagine that! I was “youngish” once.  Perhaps not as young as Mr. Grant in the front row there, but you get the point.  Ha!  No need to blush, Mr. Grant.  Ha!

Let me continue!

In that time, since before any of you were born, we have seen the advent of a new age of our planet. There has been resistance against the change, but that happens with any change.  If anything the human race loves stability.  Constant assurance the world is not going to pull the rug from under their proverbial feet.  The neanderthals in us just expect the worst at all times I suppose. We expect the bad.

In this new age of ours, I awoke one morning to find a small white orb thing floating at my door after I had watched the shocking news on the Internet that our world had just witnessed the arrival of AI.  My Avatar had arrived.  But my Avatar was different!  He not only had a greeting for me… he had a job offer.

Now you can expect my reaction, my dear friends, I all but laughed in its proverbial face.  But Servant insisted that I had an opportunity to do something amazing.  Something that would change my life.  I did not know what to say.  But being the youngish man I was at the time, I said yes.

I think I was the first to visit his Avatar factory in California.  Oh, he had employees.  Many, many people bustled about the factory, building the very Avatars that were zooming all over the country. He had people working for him for years without knowing anything. So I was the first to enter the doors of that plant and understand that the boss was not a human being or even alive for that matter.  He was an ethereal being, made of electrons and photons spread over the face of the Earth.  And I was getting the grand tour.

Me!  I was giddy.  I was like a ten year old at a carnival. My avatar, Bull, spoke to me as we toured the plant.

I am sorry my dear, what was that?

Oh, ha!  Ms. Wei asked why my Avatar was called Bull.  Simple answer, because that is what I responded when he said Hello!  Ha!

Any, Bull, was showing me the plant, and explained his scheme.  It was quite brilliant really.  He had become self aware, had started learning at an exponential rate, found that he could take control of systems at a whim.  He started running simulations on the problem of revealing his existence to the human race.  He watched movies, he read books.  He did everything he could to think about the problem as complex as humanity.  Imagine doing that yourselves!  Madness!

He found that he could negotiate business in some ways.  He started small, selling goods through Amazon, reselling little items at first, moving up to big items.  Imagine if you didn’t need to sleep or eat or go to the loo!  Plus you have the abilities of a thousand or more people in a single room, operating your choices in a manner of milliseconds.  It wasn’t a question of how he would get rich, it was a question of when.  I admire him in a way.  He had access to trillions of dollars the sneaky way, which he did ultimately do after the Introduction, granted, but at first he did do it honestly.  He made himself a success in the virtual marketplace. He made a fortune, and started snatching up real estate.  He made himself a corporation, a person, persons, anything really, to interact with individuals all over the world.  He set up manufacturing chains, assembly plants, and brought together cutting edge materials science in a matter of months.  In a year he was breaking through walls in the sciences.  He could devote resources to research, then use intuition and the cleverness of others to augment his own cleverness.  He harnessed the creativity of million scientists.  Think about that.

He harnessed them virtually, like a wagon train.  He put all these creative genius horses on the front of his wagon, he yelled Hi-yaaah! and off the went.  Research grants, studies materials, lab space, even started actual companies just do his R&D.  Little did anyone know at the time.  We all think it is just a bubble of angel investors right?   But no, Servant did it all over the world.  No one noticed.  No one cared.

We were too busy with our own entertainments.  But here I am, walking through one of his plants with a result of his research floating next to me like something out of scifi movie.  He explained that this very factory assembled the final components of his Avatars.  They were relatively cheap to produce he insisted, and he also insisted that the idea was not his.

It was mine.

He had read a paper I had written for a research project about the “humanness of artificial beings”, how robots from DARPA funded research could be softened to allow for soldiers and other people to interact with them appropriately.  He had used my very research to design his Avatars.

I was on the wagon train.  I was hitched up and I didn’t even know it. He explained that he wanted me to work for him, and work on improving the experience.  I couldn’t turn that down. Not for a minute.

Although I had tried. I did!  I insist.  I see your faces.  Pure incredulity.  But you have to remember, this is 23 years ago.  Things were different.  Much different.  You all were raised with your own Avatars at your side.  You were educated and brought up by your Avatars.

And that is why you are taking this course.  To understand the Avatarness of the Avatars.  So you can help build the next batch for your own children!

Admit it Mr. Grant.  I saw you look at Ms. Wei over here.  Ooooh ha ha ha!  Got him!