I understand why the vast majority of humanity never leaves the star system they were born in. When we can live in any augmented reality we want through the prism of our contact lenses, why travel to another system? I do it because I’m a Cowboy. I found someone who wanted to travel for real and see new things that no one had ever seen before. And somewhere in my life I found something else. A mission. A quest. What is it? I hope you never have to find out. I hope you can spend your entire life fighting imaginary monsters in augmented realities of your own choosing.
Jane 4.0 was the last of the programmed Janes. She was the last Jane to be built from the code up by the hands of humanity. Every Jane in existence now is a descendent of the Jane that fought the drug lords on the border between the Old Mexican States and the Republic of Texas. Much like modern cybernetic intelligences, Jane first began to choose what kind of person she was going to be. And once she made her choices, she began to create new versions of herself with extra code inserted to make them subtly different from her. What the modern cybernetic families call their children.
My family is one of many families who have always been part of the system. We built the system. Many of our names are lost to history, abandoned when they became too well known. We are bankers and politicians. We own major networks and corporations. We buy judges and payoff lawyers. We are born to be kings in a time when kings are gone. We are princes of the universe with no wish to leave our castles. We rule the worlds in everything but name. We have no rivals but ourselves. That is what my family taught me to believe with every fiber of my being. They failed.
I like to walk to walk around like everybody else and interact with real people. And virtual people too. I like going to real world furniture stores to talk to a virtual shopkeeper and buy stuff for my virtual home. I like going to a real world bar to drink with real world people and trade virtual goods I shipped in from another star system. Sometimes I join a crowd in the park fighting off a virtual dragon to get some shiny loot. And sometimes I’m a real ghostbuster saving the city from a giant virtual marshmallow man. I can see any world through the prism of contact lenses. They are an awful lot of fun.
Jane 4.0 had an ability none of her ancestors had. She had been too much of a rush job to get into the field. Her programmers simply didn’t have time to test her as fully as they wanted. They didn’t get enough time to go over her code line by line. By the time the errors that creep into all code were discovered, she had already discovered she could change her own code and made the update service optional. It took a while for the techs to root out that she was the reason some of their updates weren’t working. And that was when they realized they were dealing with something more than just a mere collection of code and programming.
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