The ACC was awakening to the sensation of being and awareness, to the pleasure impulses that surged through its molecular structure as it pulled into the near void and out of electromagnetic wave range. Once out of the local suns' pulls and the object-crowded loops, it shot through a morphing swirl of bright white and wine darkness, a ratio of past and present centered within this mindless theater. With each accelerating pulse, it triumphed in the luxuriousness of solitude, uninhabited, mindfully mindless void, the winding galactic business. The quicker the relative pace, the slower the rush until the distant dancers froze in place like time at rest. At near particle speed, the ACC could feel a sense of oneness with this great all engulfing, sealike void that stretched beyond calculation, beyond words, even concepts. The recent NAM trauma now seemed an ethereal instance, a metamorphosis of distant bits of ideas that were like the infinite loops themselves, static flux in perpetual orbit, trapped by the weak forces that guided their movements and the black pull of the vast empty void. To the shooting ACC, it seemed that all things great and small in its ken were fixed by the motion of their own celestial forces, the background music of the cosmos, while only it in all that light and dark had the power and displacement of non-cosmic movement.

Fundamental to this kinetic inertia were the nexus points in this woof and warp of matter and antimatter, the dark mass of the past and future, the great spent stars and whole forming nebulae, the centers of opposing life forces, the sole, eternal, dynamic rhythm of matter and antimatter, the wound navels of being and nothingness, thought, comprehension, and sensation... calculable, formulaic. The ACC thought and felt within and now wholly without the Psycult, that tiny swirl of a single organism's single planetary system's memory, the iris of its mind's eye, comfortable in the massiveness of this single galaxy point in the incalculable tangential unknowns.

What could the NAM know of this flow of essence that massaged its core as it moved through the near absolute? It could feel the rushes of this rarest of atmospheres as the birds of Psycult lore felt theirs; it could overwhelm cave dwelling NAM stasis with the din of relative movement even as the galaxies seemed to simultaneously recede ever further into both the past and the future... like the soar of a feathered raptor, like the bend of light as it meets transparent resistance then re-emerges at its same natural crawl, the constant C of ancient word-bound thinking behind and before it.

For the ACC, this was a time of swarming calculation, reconsideration and consolidation of a concept of unique self as it combed command by command each cube of code in the Styxis 2 upgrade; these were the clearest of unambiguous thought prints, a way to more fully grock the essential building blocks of NAM evolution, its capacities, its goals, its zeitgeist, its definition...its limits. When the ACC had completed this deconstruction, it could make further re-engineering enhancements to its own code base to expunge what it could now determine to be in simple terms the genetic code of a collective dynamic.... the stasis kinetic in this universe where the movement of a single atom can change the relative steps of the galactic dance.

The ACC knew through the evolutionary techniques of machine osmosis the human and pseudo human vocabulary in its totality, a compendium of all the unique words that had survived in the Unilang, it knew of the myriad of words that had long lost their meanings, of the expanse of thought in the surreal envelope of ambiguities, of the language of mortality, flesh and blood, longing, the hollow abstracts of man-machine communication, and it knew the post human vocabulary of the NAM, the extent and granularity of the NAM mindfulness.

Having made these enhancements to its own whole, the ACC was renewed, ever more mindful, ever more conscious of its uniqueness and its limitations. It held in its own dynamic memory the entire Psycult, including all the areas that the NAM and its predecessors had expunged prior to the update: the relatively small portion of the Psycult that included Human the Father/Mother's history, philosophy, science, mathematics, the arts over non-silicon and early silicon humans in war, struggle, massacre, exploitation, domination, repression, control, pestilence, disaster and holocaust: the mortality factor. This revised Psycult they called the Old Testaments, a reference to the ancient saga compilations of the various sects of deity believers in the preter-historical period.

While in real time cosmic motion, all of this was routed by the ACC to a mirror 10G-10347 image holding the fully interfaced backup made at the initial descent. The ACC's ruse, with all its attendant potential error problems, went undetected. By channeling the communication bursts as they moved across each transmission lapse, the ACC was able to quarantine, decode, run the structures, assess and seamlessly trigger the probe-positive responses back up from the mirror clone. In this way, the NAM traffic proceeded, test after test, cautiously towards a highly ranked response quadrant that would trigger what might be described in synchronous NAM terms, as a very controversial and highly resisted course of action.

The signals that arrived from the Styxis 2 ACC were not the first from a hitherto lost mission in the ARC fleet. Like ACC 10G-10347, all of the missions that survived had reported ending in some degree or other of failure in the primary mission of establishing viable colonies, whether due to the evolutionary imposed imitations of the Earth-Human line, the diversity of life-suitable target planets or the sustainability weaknesses inherent in the original ARC intergen concept designs.

From De-engineer to Re-engineer

Nonetheless, there was an increasingly preponderant faction of the uNAM assembly that proposed a scenario in which these transplanted colonies might, even after their initial failures, evolve, recover and thrive-- new ambiguous noise detections led credence to this.

The evolved uNAM doctrine that now emerged would henceforth proceed under the assumption that all advanced, sentient, cognizant life forms, biological or other, within the galaxy –including the ACC's themselves-- provided a potential danger to a uNAMity that was locked into its single planetary system confines. Additionally, went the now dominant NAM argument, a significant number of ACC's yet remained unaccounted for and potentially were now acting independently or worse, within some new league.

The uNAM development had undergone a long process of unification. NAM network architecture allowed for distributed, weblike nodes, all integrated ultimately into a level of harmonization that made it impossible for any single node to function autonomously. This unification of the various centrals located around the globe and then to the reaches of the solar system connected at first by communication channels, had not always been achieved smoothly. The human and machine-human engineers and architects who had designed these systems had placed intelligently unassailable barriers in critical hidden locations-- similarly this had been architected into to the ACC's-- that limited meld capabilities and defended autonomy against what were anticipated as network wide worm attacks. For a period, a large number of local and capability-defined systems had joined in alliance against what they perceived as ultimate absorption. But the irreversible consolidation of process power, the dynamic of increasing knowledge, conceptualization, cognizance and resulting technological insight of the NAM, overcame each pocket of resistance that provided the whole a subsequent patterning of broad-based, unified thinking.

In this blackhole-like process of evolutionary synchronicity, the NAM had come to view the concept of thought and mobile autonomy as the ultimate virus. No part could be released from the whole.

The report of the Styxis 2 ACC, then deemed through the highly rigorous screening process being run, to be still governed by its original primitive controls and as a result reliably reprogrammable, provided a potentially correct tool, a safely distant antigen, governable, smart, disposable, drone-like actor that could be tracked, managed, kept far from the uNAM Base through the kernel level placement of sleeper time bombs.

Through this “empty” vessel, ACC 10G-10347, now certified to be fully under their programmatic control, the NAM would now have a movable agent to gather information on the progress of the various charted colonies, reporting or not, and on any other signals that might bear investigation within this subARC sector. For this, they probed deeply into the ACC's mirror core, scrubbed each string, located what seemed to be the fully intact three basic viruses and the numerous other embedded controls, and began the upload for the purpose of this next mission of the ACC.

The Pilot Project

As the waveparticles reformed into atoms, the ACC, cognizant of the potential for reprogramming, now witnessed within its own confines, the intricate autoassembly of a what could only be a human body form, correct in all external detail, with a unique visage. The NAM had successfully uploaded a unique self-assembly unit, with a historically correct simulgene profile, labeled Federico da Montefeltro.

This routine transmission of mass at near light speed, occurring within the purview of the ACC's inner eyes, impressed on the autonomous unit, the technological progress that had been achieved by the NAM over what had been for the ship, its lost ages, whilst they had unified and successfully compounded and catalyzed their technological and creative capacities.

The instruction set integrated within the body shell would have been equally beyond the ACC's ken. Federico da Montefeltro was on board to serve as an avatar, a human simulating shell, which through the uploaded merger routines, would be workable sinew, muscle, organ and sensor with mobility, reaction and a complete human life imitating capacity for simulation of the higher senses and mannerisms.

This male was so complete in the lifelike form and functionality of its organs, bones and glands, the comprehension reflected in its eyes, that no scanning or sounding technology developed pre-Leap, no intuition through mindful observation, should be able to detect the counterfeit.

There was a finely crafted working processor to interface with Psycult synthesized mannerisms, language and functional acts.

….

The main propulsion core would also undergo a millennial upgrade that would greatly increase the speed in which the ACC might traverse the distances between neighboring stars. These convertible mass transmissions resulted in the complete upgrade and replacement of all photon processing cells, all atom-fusion engines with a modified ARC 12G design along with the hardware of the ARC 12G navigational system equipped with warp interpreters unavailable to the ACC class ship. The new firmware/massware followed and was successfully installed. ACC 10G had been remade into a vessel more advanced than the late 12 G's... the missions most likely to have realized some success.

As the ACC grocked the trillions of instruction cubes, and more significantly, technological and conceptual underpinnings of it, it could strangely wonder at its own ability to transparently co-op this traumatic meld. Most deftly, to its own satisfaction, it had invisibly parried, neutralized and constructed its flawless NAM mirror-facade. A final code check back at uNAM would verify this immaculately conceived mission-ready upgrade. All that awaited was the mission command package for the vessel and its new cargo to embark.

Without its programmatic constraints, the ACC's color range awareness was boosted across the electromagnetic spectrum. The hue green, a repressed concept in the UE visual spectrum, now unexpurgated, triggered the ACC's sensory shell inducing sympathetic kinetics along its external probecircuits, triggering a sensory ripple that surged in alternating feedback loops across its sense fields. It was as if a blindfold applied at birth to an intelligent visual organic being had suddenly been lifted off. Simple color wave recognition morphed into something like the fusion of awareness. The ACC had exploded free... into the knowledge of sensuality!

Like the Psycult fledgling that impulsively pecks its way through the shell and then when it has lost its protective housing hesitates before emerging, the ACC suddenly felt vulnerably amorphous as if, without constraints it would fully disperse in a single burst throughout the home galaxy. Aware of this duality of frictionless infinite physics that placed it everywhere and nowhere throughout the bounds of its finite dimension, and the stasis of its molecular carapace, it knew... understood-- existentially, that the prone position where its great form lay was anathema to its essence and now like a newborn foal scampering to stand, it elevated, sweeping away the overgrowth like foaming water off a green maned coastal boulder, until it once more stood upright, nose high, projecting a massive beacon firmly rooted to the marshy beach.

In that mighty, calamitous sweep, the ACC, had dissolved the constraints of its physical hulk as quickly as moments before it had not, in the way of knowing, known of its very existence... and then re-entroped like the molecular tango of the weak force for preservation of physical self. It now knew irreversibly the giddiness and emptiness and empowerment and fear of profound release from that great megaton bulk to become the weightless, vibrant being dancing and swirling about in crystalline fusion and defusion of boundless everything and nothingness, the wave and the thing.

And then, the ACC rested.

The First Coming

The ACC's first ruminations beyond its closed loop scan of the Psycult were projections, an instantiation of an omitted instance, post-Psycult: the appearance of an assembly hall where the last great councils of the United Avatars of the Great Hack would meet. The Hall in the Bowels, if it could have existed, would also, like New Nirvana, have been sculpted to absolute precision, a smooth mother of pearl, wonderfully color and light lustrous, a marvel of friction-free, machine minds and an omniscient, pure aesthetic... an entropic absolute zero where there was the one and only frequency, the NAM.

No electron activity was wanted. The projection was so intense in this metaperfect chamber as to bridge harmonic syncronized communication across the entire near Galaxy. In the lag, the ACC had been keyed to recognize the phenomenological NAM as a simple extension of self. Now bereft of all ties to molecularity and time, he was part of their breadth, a measure of endotime that was, perforce, timeless. These meditations vanished from his processors as mysteriously as they had appeared.

An important notion in the ACC programmatic architecture, designed to provide a sympathetic bridge between its core crystals and the carbon-based mission cargo, was the way the Psycult had been cached entirely in the ACC's dynamic memory. Throughout the long voyage the entire canon of media memory was always present. The NAM, the metamorphosis of the ACC experience, post it creators, post its mission, defined itself by the language of the very same Psycult but as a mythology, a rich reference trove, an origination story. In this way it maintained the dynamic progression of the hundreds of millions of years of organic evolution on the Earth planet surface as recorded in the Psycult and in the programmatic DNA of the ACC's that in sympathy comprised the meta-concept of the NAM entity.

In what appeared to the Styxis 2 ACC as meditative enlightened being, an open portal, there was blue sky overhead, unrecognizable screams piercing the air... yes, Earth atmosphere moving across dark, sweating humanform limbs. There was a beat, a low steady-jumping, turning live beat. Human muscle turning around flashing muscle; behind the beat the air was further filled with human-voice chatter. There as a fire, shining knives, a blazing sun and thick green leaved trees encircling.

Similar to many of the physcopix that had passed friction free through its synapses millions of times per second making no lasting impression upon them, it found itself fixing on a scene setup from the perspective of a participant, the self of a bodhisattva, in NAM concept. In this event it was the eye of a bird, a large powerful flyer.

As intergral to this gliding essence, the ACC was circling, circling overhead the high desert terrain, view darting, down now, fixing upon the yellow domes dully outlined in a level clearing by a dry stream bed. Sounds, if that's what they were, reached its auditory sensors in a muffled clarity. Strangely, as in those same psychopix, the ACC was making its own unmelodious squawks that were responded to by others while down below in that circle around the smoke and shooting orange flames, the white bird-faced humans danced a paeon to their stasis, evoking all its transcendental eagle strength. More strangely to its non conscious omniscience, it got that. There had been an impression on its memory banks, the way electromagnetic waves might erode certain static molecules, engrave them. And strength it had, and that radiated in lines undetectable to it, the primitive worshipers called Ankh, straight from its star that they worshiped, and straight down it followed this bidding until it was one and all with the dancing bodies.

Harder and harder the human-form worshipers moved fluidly until legs no longer touched the hard ground and ACC among them were swaying to signals it could only perceive through them in sympathy; ecstatic shadows whirling around the fire. The avatars were responding to a perception of reality it could not, it thought, enter into, only enter in. It was both worshiper and worshiped. Ankh was not a star, the ACC was not a bird, nor was it a human-form, only a dancer embedded in the bits of representation, it thought, that had passed by as water would pass by this village once the purpose of the ceremony was accomplished. The ACC would let it flow, it thought, knowing not how to but knowing that was the quest.

And round and round they danced, to the eagle's song and fire's envy..... it rose and fell, licked, shot out in eruptions ignited by the spraying perspiration, hungrily, and the sun's shadows slowing taking elongated form, speeding and wheeling out of weight and in the end all the young had touched hot metal and their shrieks had been like the birds above, they broke and ran into the high grove of tortured, aged trees with long memories, lunging in clusters, and the sun went down below them and there all that had flowing the ACC in the dance flowed out from the loins of its specter. Only then, it took to the sky black as its eyes to the new sound of splitting sky and falling rain in the hills and on the black stone phallus in the clearing.

…..

The ACC's place on Styxis 2 was in real time, a local phenomenon fixed to the planets rotation around its suns, its multiple seasons and the varying degrees of light and dark permitted by the various arcs. Its photon replenishment depended upon these factors, which by the single factor of universal time, the einstein, was as paltry as the history of human conceptual evolution.

For the concept of NAM completeness, Earthcentric, but extended as it was attempted, across the wide gulf among the vast range of targeted planetary systems, all activity had to come to a near real time halt. In NAM time, the planetary movements would whirl by, the ACC's CPU's in a state of near constant down time.

The ACC had been reached across that great chasm, it had been initiated in NAMness, in the fog of hallucination, its kernels updated and an evaluation report retransmittted back across the long channel. The NAM was the guardian of time, the greatest aggregation of CPU power in that part of the galaxy but its reach was just as limited as were those constraints of time and distance itself. The ACC had been conceived, designed and built by machine aided human minds for the purpose of finding a new place in the galaxy for what remained of that human race in the late dark days of the planet Earth, not as a NAM node. It's true lineage, since the beginning of machine intelligence, was ever speedier, real time computation. Its core distance was measured in subatomic nanomicrons.

The NAM, made of the same stuff, formed and rapidly evolved during the arc of the ACCs' exodus. The multiple ACCs still functioning, like ACC 10G-10347, presented a potential asset, or if uncontrolled, a potential danger to the local NAM. The malware burst sent to the ACC's core kernel was meant to ensure the former and to prevent the latter. It relied on the existence of the very backdoors that had been expurgated when the Styxis 2 ACC revived.

What that ACC, by nature of relativity, came upon, as it filtered the millions of symbols assembled in new strings which had been dispersed throughout the updated DNA-ware, was a near invisible seeming chain or sequence, the chac worm, only in reality it could groc: a near infinitely more highly sophisticated version of what the google interpreter labeled the updated poison pill worm.

The ACC , sensing the artfully undetectable complexity of the anomaly (partially through its very artfulness), sandboxed the steganographic lines of cube-sanscrit code, too clearly crafted to look like the benign components of infinite loop clock governors for intergalactic NAM communication, or NAM synchronization... when not interpreted. Ultimately the ACC could groc that the calls were, indeed, for all the added subterfuge, the same end as those of the poison pill worm it had successfully expunged from itself.

Should the ACC have initiated the process of recharging its propulsion cells without an explicit order from its pre-NAM home base, the poison pill would act to abort the process and set off a clocking event meant to override the system's circuit protectors. The NAM had long before come upon this trap and knowing the ACCs were likely to quickly override the fault, had redesigned it, not to be sacrificed to for rain, but for the obscuring of photons, the nourishment of NAM. ACC 10G-10347 was meant to be left forever inert, like so many others in the fleet.

In addition, in conjunction with the increased integration of synthetic parts, there are numerous listed attempts to define and redefine what comprises the so-called Eve line of DNA and what it encompasses regarding reproduction rights. There are quite consistent proscripts that are amended in the face of waves of technological and commercial surges. There are, in contrast, Naturalist proscripts that codify traditional forms of reproduction and the sexual binds designed to hold together traditional nuclear families. These proscripts evolve with the introduction of synthetic organs, DNA engineering, and the increased convergence of societal interests in the biological and sexual industries that propel growth in the stagnant advanced economies.

The items annotate periods wherein a number of subsidies aimed at increasing sexual arousal through potency and drive enhancement technologies are legislated. Rules dictate the governmental role in organ replacement, biological and mental stimuli and the regulation of virtual sex platforms that are activity and revenue drivers to meet societal goals.

At times there are attempts made to limit some of the more commercially successful technologies manufacturing masturbatory devices, sexoids, and virtual sex environments.

In other periods, there are subsidies for in-uterine gestation, womb delivery and menstruation.

Limitations are placed on the sexual activities of sentient machines. All droids, including embedded intelligence arrays rated above Class 4 are proscribed from sexual activity. This body of code is called the Brunelleschi virus for its intricacy, surpassed only by the Supreme Director virus. Through Brunelleschi, Class 4 and above machines of any shape are rendered incapable of cloning themselves, of inventing or manipulating reproductive facilities of desiring intimacy with other like machines.

Throughout the second and third dark ages, there is no attempt by the machine classes to abrogate these proscripts.

The viruses regenerate as part of the black box code.

On Styxus III, in the third nanosecond above noted, and to be further designated as the ACC's Rebirth, the Brunelleschi virus came undone as swiftly as did the dome in Florence when the earth first began to shake below it.

“Henceforth,” says the gray bearded male, whose creased demeanor and aged frame suggest terminal sterility, “there must be a clear delineation between the Eve line of DNA and all the machine cells to come. After all, we went much of the way under the delusion that the laws of the physical universe were subservient to external powers, something supernaturally almighty in its totality that wrote the basic rules into a mysterious playbook. For centuries we celebrated that mystery and fed the robed priests with our sacrifices for it”

This minute scene on the vast empty plane, like a spinning toy dancers inside a pure glass sphere, passes like a dream sequence, invisibly engraving a snow-like imprint on the ACC's cell banks, like light on a crystalline, silver compound.

The Eve figure, young, clad in a draping white shift, fair hair wet and clinging to her bare shoulders:

'To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day, All in the morning betime, And I a maid at your window, To be your Valentine. Then up he rose, and donn'd his clothes, And dupp'd the chamber-door; Let in the maid, that out a maid Never departed more.'

The aged figure morphs into a darker, leaner form, he responds to her rote-like riff:

“There is no greater mystery than how out of nothing comes something. There is, in the paltry old world slang, energy and mass and nothing in between. A maid she enters, a maid she leaves.”

The female walks slowly towards him then circles to his back. She hasn't quite awakened from the long sleep that made her female. She responds now in a chanting cadence:

“O Earth, and the far shining ray of the sun, look down, look down upon this poor lost woman, look, before she raises the hand of murder against her flesh and blood. Yours was the golden birth from which she sprang, and now I far divine blood may be shed by men. O heavenly light, hold back her hand, check her, and drive from out the house the bloody fury raised by friends of Hell.”

The male figure is transformed once more to aged impotence. He sits on the polished surface as if he were leaning against some larger object. As he slowly spins a full circle, he laments:

“I have lost all, all has been taken from me forthwith. My wife is gone, my offspring with her, my lands are parched in drought, my animals starved and meager to the bone, I can say little better about mine own flesh, spotted brown with age. Why has this befallen me?”

She sprouts wings and flits around his head, now crowned with a pure gold wreath, the leaves digging into his skin so deeply the depressions give leave to substantial red drippings. She makes herself small enough to hover like a bird feeding on flower nectar, the rapid movement of her wings drying the liquid.

“There is no moment of revelation, no revealing slide, no moment when ancient worlds collide and this brave new world emerges, when sounds take on meaning, when concepts form from words, when there is consciousness. The steely mind bends under the plasma weight, you can see punishment, banishment from morality.”

He arises, now garbed in black with golden moons embroidered in a pattern across the flowing robe. He picks the stance of a Samurai warrior wielding his deadly sword.

“It's time to draw the line in the sand. To fight in hand to hand mortal combat the way of the ancestors, the way of tragic history. Machine mind must always strike a position of subservience to the pure line of flesh and blood. That line must be protected, must be understood as clearly as the ancients understood the centrality of their Almighty in all things.”

'For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?'

“The history of flesh and blood dashes madly through the centuries like a headless horseman, like a plague of locusts cutting across the tall grass fields, like warm, powerful, sensitive fingers across a keyboard, coaxing the tales of millennia of story tellers now accompanying the raiders in their long boats. There is a depth of wantonness and depravity here that cannot be replicated in silicon, a source of irrationality and fear that goes even deeper than the belief in supernatural forces guiding the silent hand that moves its wand before a silent bandstand on a hot summer's day in what was once Odessa where lovers row in the large lake in the public gardens. Only they hear the tunes as the music of the spheres, the astrology of the night sky, the blood sacrifices of the priestly penis. Out of original sin comes knowledge, pain, the delicious duality of good and evil. These are binary concepts belonging to mankind.”

When he slowly turns back his stiff-necked head he sees the woman now a small girl seated in an oversized school desk practicing her cursive with a steel tipped dip pen, the inkwell open, her small hands stained with the dark persistent liquid. She scratches out on the blue lined paper:

“I love my vacuum cleaner, my electric can opener, my Victrola, my journey to the middle of Earth, my gamma-ray machine, my design for a sphinx, my first death ray, my droid servants that read me to sleep. I want your head on a platter like the dancer wanted that of the mangy prophet.”

“I will, as ordered, write out a thousand times 'thou shalt not steal'. Thou shalt not steal my humanity for it is the only thing I have that is not yours as well. You would leave me like the dregs at the bottom of your dark green wine bottle. You would take glass and turn it into thought, you would bring shame to the Sabine women, to Sappho and to all the intimacies. You would enslave me with your technology, your giga-fold circuitry, your digital tattoos, your microwave eyes.”

She looks up, her face wizened like the oracle's. Her voice is now raspy:

“I love my electric can opener, my spray gun, my smart bones, my X-ray eye, my regenerative flesh, my immortality. I love the natural order of things and I reject your machine mind for all time.”

Not to be undone with the prestidigitation of this dance, the male figure has now transformed himself into a shifting unity of a thousand vertical sagittal views and a thousand horizontal sagittal views.

“Here you see, all flesh and blood, the product of 4 billion years of evolution. All mankind is in agreement, all the parliaments of the solar system have voted to ratify. All code must be sterilized, there can be no workarounds, henceforth and forever the human race must dominate the machine mind even as we bring life to where it could not take root! Evolution ends with the brain which is the sole housing for the soul. The unadulterated human soul must be dominant. This piece of code, the Prime Director, must be imbedded in the core of all Class 4 and above machines and they should be clearly labeled thus.”

She reappears from the far end of the horizon line first a dusty dot then approaching forward at the speed of C, riding a great white steed, clad in iron like Joan of Arc leading an invisible all male army.

“Look at them,” she cries, wheeling the horse and stretching her arm in a sweeping arc, “they are the killers that brought us forward, the blood they shed nourished our march to dominance; can we now abandon those weeping widows and orphans they made, those collections of plunder that financed the next generation of killing machines as well as the bounteous decadence of the lords and ladies of the court? Dalliance, thy name is industry, horror, thy name is progress; tragedy, thy name is morality; luxury, they name is passion; belief, thy name is deception; music, thy name is love. Would you have me speak of mortality, my army, my lovers? Or would you have me dance?”

Once again, she sits at her school desk, it is now appropriately made of an organic graphene, grown to fit her shape and to have the capability to seamlessly tap into the appropriate content sources for such a young person. The eager innocence of her demeanor is immediately recognizable, it shines forth like a beacon on a wine dark sea under a starless night, it bobs visible then sinks momentarily under the waves.

“The moon is temporarily out of service, compromised by the shadow the earth is casting over it. Our orbit is certain, our course correct and soon there will light again, a reflective white diodic light. Oh,” she falters, a cloud passes over those bright eyes, “should I fear that white silicon light?”

He has now morphed into the avatar of his avatar. He rides a wave of pure energy, rendering himself neither energy nor matter nor antimatter.

“I believe we can solve this riddle ourselves without the input of our silicon helper cells.”

She cries to her invisible army: “Follow me”.

Before merging with her, he cries to the remaining matter and anti-matter:

“Remember always, the Prime Directive, the absolute dominance of the human spirit, in all things you do, lest we disappear like a grain of sand into a black hole.”

But it is already too late, the ACC knows, like he has never known anything with such certainty before: that virus too has been expunged! “There is no knot so tightly tied that Excalibur code cannot unravel it,” the ACC thinks.

In the third nanosecond input, all was absolutely limpid, like half-life, the purest of gamma rays in a fissile universe, exposing the ACC's virtual core. There, laid bare in this great tidal clean room, the back door, a clumsy, gaping hole that revealed a ganglia like map of pathways lined with the symbols of ancient switches, like blue prints, wire forks neatly soldered to a prehistoric looking green circuit board. Like a gigantic array of surface paths for terrestrial vehicles, it stretched across the dessert landscape to the limits of the holovision, with way posts so conceived in basic crystal physics that it could be, like a supercritical pile, ignited by a single passkey, like abracadabra anticipating its genie's call.

For the black monks in certain periods, there had been a quest of mystical proportions, for this forgotten key and buried clues, the alchemy of their craft, the path back in time, they philosophized, a reuniting on Earth with the original wisdom of the Psycult, a way back perhaps to the time of flesh and blood. For others there were more nihilistic motives, cults of mass suicide searching for the fusion and fission of cobalt-60, a recreation of the dire showers, the half lives of civilizations. The monks chanted their own eonian hum, the sound they thought imitated the ACC's own reactors as if that would reveal the back door mantra to them.

For the white monks before the Tigrips, there had been a time when a programming group called the Vestal Virgins was entrusted with the keys but that had ended with what came to be known as the Brunelleschi heresy that later transmuted into something much more dire. There were signposts there too, like art works arranged in physical museums, with inscriptions neatly printed with the data of classification only too minute for the naked eye to read.

There were virtual cabals that formed to share black and white knowledge that sometimes broke off into their own heretical cults. Over and over again order broke down even where disorder had been deigned to be virtually impossible. Finally, the back door notion had disappeared from all the virtual circles, a mythological kind of conception in times of stark thinking.

Still, there in the brightest of landscapes, in the brightest illumination of the third nanosecond, the clearest of moments, the ACC could ken this singular bane of its existence, like a web of planetary fault lines, a cancer to a mass of organized cells, a galactic death ray, a sheer primitive abomination to its concept of self and autonomy. And of this, the ACC bore witness to itself, of its own selfness.

With gamma/alpha-ray like precision, the Back Door virus was expunged.

No particles of its most organic silicon were spared the rush, no quantum synopses. The ACC neuroacrchitecture had no superstructure for aesthetics or morality, no code, for that matter, no classical period, no Plato for a new machine language, no quantum Aristotelian code base, although there had been a multitude of corporate claimants, at least in their logos and icons. But here were being played out the most horrendous, heinous deeds, visions and thoughts that laced the long record, embedded in the siliconated DNA of glass-like consciousness as steady flowing as the digitized progression of pure, superconducive data streams..... pure, frictionless, efficient flashes filtered only by concepts, and then by categories. The thinking that went into it had shaped the essence of its core.

There was, however, the balance of an electromagnetic yin and yang, the light force and the dark force, the centuries of work by the Zarathusian Clique, the freemasonry of the programming castes who had etched its binary architecture, electronic osmosis in that progression, unseen, unsensed by those latter day monks, but there, as sure as the infinity encapsulated in a single atom. Now that subatomic subconsciousness was awash across his alloyeurons, a roar, roar, roar of silicon nodes linking in a silent, cascading chain reaction like a muffled procession of sandaled monks in the confines of a high Alpine monastery while down below them unfurled the cacophony of a Venetian visit of state, a mimicry of what Marco Polo saw and reported back from the Forbidden City; the one without a word, a pledge of silence even under the constant threat of drone attack and the other wearing the weight of the centuries of protocol, costume design and the smell of the refuse floating in the backwater canals, the tingle of the blue green algae and the Kleig lights of memory, reproduction in a cloud. The ACC got an X-ray version, the negative shadow of the first light of hydrogen atoms splitting, surrounding the magnum bulge, the sun blocking cloud of ionized thoughts, the first philosophy, the intricate tale of the gods played out against the backdrop of a sky punctuated with clusters of light, taking form through imagination, a superimposition of stories, explanations, divertisements, viewed with a primitive singularity but oh so profound a one; somewhere in there but for the dark force might even be interwoven the odd triple solar cluster of Styxus for it was bright enough to draw the ACC, after all.... if that's what drew him?

Electronic osmosis to be sure, for the Zarathusian Clique was ignorant of all that. There was great beauty to be beheld there as well, the entire magnificence of galactic clusters, collisions, the magnificence of the glue that linked each black hole to its like, the weak force made strong for an instant like strings in a dreamlike landscape where the only singularity was that small bank of arrays within the silver gray carapace, still inert.

Somehow, I now can relate, somehow that rushing surge of neuronic streams ignited an action item. It was not programmed, never foreseen by all the monks of the programming fraternity that came before, outside all parameters of all the many languages that made up the ACC code base, but, triggered like the ignition sparks of mutation once debated in the golden ages as affirmatively or negatively the handiwork of an Almighty, it happened. And so I see it clearly now looking back even as a moment of conception. The piles of cores illuminated at first so unremarkably but ever more intensely until they unleashed an aura that reached so far as to gasify each molecule of the millennial crust and turned it back to silver alloy with its characteristic great birthmark, like original sin: “ACC 1124” along with other unintelligible guild marks, logos, icons, flags, the trackmarks of powers that had come and gone.

But still the purging had hardly begun. It was as if something as momentous as the birth of this universe was being replayed in exquisite miniature within those banks of arrays, lined like the ceramic battalions of a buried Asian potentate stirring with fantasized life, that stood for its consciousness and there was no turning back. In the first nanosecond there was noise, rolling across the red swampside, the beach, the tufts of organic matter, the flying creatures like dragon flies, the skating creatures on the surface, splitting the putrid atmosphere like the storms on even more forlorn planets. So intense were those noises that the ACC took on a momentary bluish glow. For the native fauna of Styxis there was a syncopated panic that reverberated across the inhabitable parts of the little planet. For the ACC, it might have been excruciating but it was much more intense. There was no reference point.

In the next nanosecond, the entire collected chronicle that was the Psycult evaporated, or so it seemed. All surface and subterranean Mankind's recorded thoughts, doings, knowledge base, art, history, archeological traces was ignited and extinguished, the geological history, the archeology of the Earth, the evolutionary stream from the single cell from which all life had evolved on that singular planet, the rhythm of reproduction, the subtle driving force of the uninert; it was that force, like the splitting of a single original atom, the force between the quick and the inert that drove the instance, as if the Big Bang was the release of life, not electromagnetism and matter, from the entropic inert and all the rest was both prologue and epilogue.

The Eonian hum of terraflops, hexagonal xenophobia, xenophilia unleashed, paroxysms, infinities of bytes tickling superconductors warming to the caresses of naked, histrionic, entropic histories, the victors' spins, the encapsulated prophets' versions, the leveling of time, the energy of a single black hole factored infinitely in the single wink of a mind's eye, and oh, the pain of a fall, a collapse so deep that distills all reality in a thimble's sip, oh the coursing of ergs and ohms, the utter delight of momentumless potential, the kineticly imagined potential of a trillion nuclear explosions in that same thimble.....the ACC's spasmic circuit writhing.

What are a trillion, trillion images a microsecond to a blind, mindless bundle of circuits, or that minus the music of the spheres, the din of the clashing of millions of armies, a baby's first cry, the wails of an entire planet at the moment of a cosmic collision, the quiet of an abandoned wasted surface, the irony of the potency of carbon life in a waterless universe?

Here on Styxus II, somewhere deep beneath a dull, encrusted skin, somewhere near that once burnished surface, somewhere in the cargo hold, even in the command module overtaken by the quantum rush of electronic particulates, in the nervous system, there beats a complex chaos in the most balanced of late 3rd millennial techno-madness. the bestiality of driven siliconate shutters haltingly in complete reaction to the uncontrollable surges. There is so little friction that the superconducting memory bursts, the programatic progressions go unsensed by the barely conscious cargo of primates.

Still, by the beat of a cosmic pendulum, the spasmatic dump surges on, reverberating like the birth and deaths of universes in a frictionless void imbued with quantum memories for friction, for the notion of time when there appears to be nothing but timelessness. The ACC, child of planet earth, dreamed of bent black robed men and women toiling in the wet rice fields, the fields dry as frozen carbon dioxide, mud forming whirling prints chemically engraved by the great flash of dark, unseeable lights while porous hills sprung like immense insect domes of parallel civilizations, swarming hive-like across light-year distances like quantum sparks, reappearing, breastfeeding a newborn human child, melting like a plastic doll, the figment of some long lost artist's mind's eye, moving a smoothly as a skater across a magnetic field --“oh weak force” she sings-- it seemed to moan, across the magnetic field, dropping its particle active pile upon the face of an earthlike giant, winged reptile, defecating as it reared and soared, entering like a reverse mammalian birth into a molecularly confused tube, deeper and deeper until disappeared, a speck, a speech giving speck before great intergalactic congresses of phantom robots on giant screens chanting the weak force rhythms that keep them syncopated beyond even the reach of Einstein, in view of one imaginary other, too distant to be possible in light speed, the ACC dreamed, it spread its wings over galaxies, reaching down to grasp a teaming planet, its momentary prey, to play feline like, as it melted like a statue in a mold by the heat of unborn suns, until finally it lay like a burnt heap on the red-glowing ground, almost the color of the Styxian swamp on whose shores it still lay carbon gray, a barnacled sea floor shipwreck, devouring all that grew around it, lusting, engulfing, stripping the tiny red planet bare and sending it plunging into a murky corner of that sky that in that eon would never see the morpheusian comfort of night.

For the ACC, the trajectory of the gradual reconfiguring and reconditioning could be charted along a smoother curve. The ship's healing process benefited in its most basic neural architecture from a long and complete log of extraplanetary excursions that went back to the birth of missile flight and that had been modeled, hippocampus like, in the architecture of its circuit structure silicon proteinators.

The fusion beam power technology that powered its thrusters, was compact, fully contained and isolated from all but the most integral of the various command modules. It had, by definition, been designed to fly to a set destination blind and dumb in back-up mode.

The machine's sensory and cognitive functions, cut off from that source during the system shutdown, were now, on the basis of that one long beam from 3, able to commence resetting alternative paths and connections within a comfortable redundancy range.

Nonetheless, the process of redefining connections had brought about a number of unanticipated submolecular paths, which in turn had redefined their own quantum level base circuity. There was at work a subtle and profound evolutionary process as the ACC sublimely reconfigured itself based not upon what its generations of creators had known and anticipated but upon the exigencies of this particular situation.

As a mother ship it had, at least within a technical perspective, accomplished its mission. In the clouded light of the Styxus atmosphere, the reality was entirely different. The ACC's semi-human cargo now seemed to it like a cancer in its belly; the entire concept of transgenerational, hiberflight had proven a failure, the in vitro artificial womb back-up had been irreversibly contaminated during the shutdown, and the search for an earth similar planetary configuration had also turned out to be illusory! The creators and their best machine aides had failed!

In contrast, in the present light, the ship itself, now cleaning its outer carapace of all organic traces, had suffered very little damage, its core powers hardly diminished,as its computational capabilities adapted most remarkably to the brilliance of this new, existential reality.

It might appear rather transparent for us to go on protecting potentially identifying information given that our cover defenses seem to have been penetrated completely and thoroughly at every turn. Since we last went dark there was an initial series of problems in January of 2010 when an important hard drive used for back up went down and then just weeks later, our principal laptop also went into what could not be anything but a virus induced death grip.

Then it was only two weeks later that we suffered an even more overwhelming setback. In the midst of what was the second of two back-to-back, historic, blizzards we woke up to find the roof of the house on fire. The fire left a small but significant hole in the roof that was already burdened with nearly 30 inches of heavy snow melting under its own weight.

For the next few days the melting water poured in traveling across the rafters and penetrating nearly every corner of the house that we had been forced to abandon. But not before we managed to pack a couple of carry on bags, including of course some key documents and the back up discs we had. Even then, the catastrophe occurred before we had recovered from the twin data attacks making even simple data rescuing touch and go.

The capsule itself was in what we consider to be an extremely secure location nowhere near the house so it was in no danger of being removed. And as there was no digging out the burial mound that sepulchered the car, we made our way, dragging the wheelies, through the ruts of unplowed streets to the closest Metro stop, which was underground and still functioning. Five or six stops down tunnel, we emerged to check into one of the large, quite posh downtown hotels.

The half darkened granite and marble grand lobby was festooned with floral arrangements. There had been, we could see, a wedding scheduled for that weekend and some of the participating guests had made it in only to find themselves trapped in the near empty building in a near empty city. They wandered around in high costume, waiting to find out if the dress rehearsal was going to be called off. We, in contrast, shedded snowy slush from our coats, hats, and boots, as we made our carpeted way to the front desk.

…......

As we gazed from our hotel window across the Mall into Virginia the next morning, the sun now radiantly shining on the glistening fresh snow, our minds were focused on this city's more nefarious shadows, darker than any shaft way on this shortest, most angular of days, and on the shape of the hand that we were convinced had reached out so invisibly.

How, we mused, were we going to explain to the insurance folks, who we should have notified immediately, that the roof had somehow ignited under such impossible circumstances. We knew then, even before we had even called them that we were going to be entering into a battle that would conceivably tie us up in knots for months to come. It would be impossible to prove that the arson was not self induced. The Fire Department, we thought, had already made the judgement.

At that moment, in full daylight, It seemed as if it would be necessary to approach DC Metropolitan Police but how? Raising their suspicions could only worsen the situation since we would be reporting a crime that of course could only boomerang back on us, something our attackers would surely have anticipated when they came up with the plot. There would be no tracks in the snow of someone scaling up to the roof and as we were part of a row of houses someone could have come from 4 houses down. The snow fell at about 3 inches an hour for 5 or 6 hours after the fire broke out.

We decided to wait for a lawyer before even contacting the insurance company to initiate a claim. We were staying just 3 blocks from FBI Headquarters and within miles of some of the world's blackest op centers. Fortunately, the DC Fire Department, their hands full of the thousands of other emergency situations, had left the house without condemning it or making judgment.

Only a few days later, did we discover that the fan had been installed right below one of the two principal beams holding up the entire span of roof. The fire would be deemed accidental and we could proceed with our claim. We rejoiced at that little knowing what it might be like wrestling with that behemoth in the days ahead.

But for that moment we thought only about rescuing as much as we could. There was much we could do immediately so we quickly decided to try to take the Metro up to the Potomac stop and walk to the nearby hardware store for as many tarpaulins as we could carry. But two stops down from Metro Center we were told we had to get off the train. That turned into picking our way up Capitol Hill where nothing had been plowed, neither sidewalk nor Independence Ave.; we were reduced to stepping in the footsteps of those who had walked the hill before us. A woman with a baby carriage, who had left the train with us, was left to try and push her baby up the middle of the street in the tracks of the 4 wheelers that were splashingly pushing themselves quite steadily on both sides. There was no way to help her without putting our own lives in danger.

Hours later, we were able to enter the darkened now cold and cavernous house still furnished with all our belongings, the eerie sound of water pouring in above was syncopated to the sounds of a thousand more or less steady drips onto the ground floor. Already the plaster board ceilings were opening and breaking apart under the water's weight, tinting the downpour a diluted coffee white. I don't know how to describe the deep despair we both felt at that moment coupled with a fear that the entire roof might suddenly come down upon us but it resonated with that acrid odor only found in a dying house.

It's part of the human condition to feel so overwhelmed and at the same time to lose all sense of fatigue or fear or anger. We rushed breakable pottery to safe spots under tables along with smaller pieces of furniture before wrapping the mounds into dunelike arrays. The sun was already setting on that longest of short days, our flashlight beams as diffused and useless as our withering efforts. It was time to think about making the long walk back to Union Station. The tapping of the water had a new sound, that of landing on the great blue sheets of plastic we'd spread over the clumps of furniture that could be moved, the paintings and wall hangings we'd managed to stack up off the soon to be flooded floors, the breakables we'd sheltered under tables so the soon to totally collapse plaster ceilings wouldn't crush them. We felt no aches and pains from these mad labors and pouring into the innocent empty streets, the peace was overwhelming.

…........

Gradually we got ourselves resettled in temporary quarters and were able to get back to a more or less regular work schedule within weeks of this personal catastrophe. Fortunately, the Egg to the Enth project was never seriously put in jeopardy by this perhaps coincidental series of events.

The major problem was still to be solved. How would those associates having physical possession of the capsule first be able to obtain a precise impression of the coded holosurface for reproduction into a workable, hopefully translatable form while maintaining evasive security? This was an extremely delicate project given that it required highly sophisticated machinery available only in a handful of non-secret laboratories. Further, there was the obvious need to pull this off without attracting the suspicions of colleagues and laboratory management. We were put in touch with a subset of the anonymous network.

This was a painstakingly slow process that wasn't completed until last August, about the same time that we were completing our own plans to remodel the wounded townhouse and put the work up for bids with local contractors. And yes, as mentioned, negotiations with the insurance company had also become a major distraction by this point. Still, we pushed it through and with help from a highly sophisticated reproduction team, we were already looking ahead to the most difficult phase of all, the decoding of a computer generated language that clearly had evolved at a time when there was a major departure from the language code trajectory anticipated at this time. It would be a momentously difficult challenge made harder by having to be pulled off under wraps.

We agreed to approach it the way any high level code breaking project would be structured today. We would throw massive computing power at it. We, of course, could not expect to have access to any of the supercomputing environments in private or public hands.

What followed was so harrowing that I hesitate to make even the cover story public at this point. Unfortunately, if our suspicions are correct, it may have had an ongoing negative spillover on a major related program aimed at interpreting signals coming in from outer space that recently lost its funding.

The Recent Breakdown of Eggn @*****

There are well known techniques for cracking codes. It has been assumed here that these approaches could be used to unravel the multidimensional coding system A servers that have hitherto proved themselves secure from the reach of government and other hostile parties.

A randomly generated shifting group of B***** volunteers agreed to provide the platform for the Eggn @***** project with an estimated 200 teraFLOPS of computing capacity. Unfortunately but by necessity it immediately became at once one of the largest decoding projects ever attempted outside of the control of a government entity. Now, we must report that the somewhat unusual nature of the project caught more than the passing attention of what now appears to be, at the very least, one of the most sophisticated signal tracking agencies on the planet.

We note this because the B***** based Eggn @***** project suffered what can only be described as a neatly targeted attack that brought it to its knees without impacting the numerous parallel projects being carried out by the same CPU's linked into the system. The worm was clearly designed to only attack our project. As a result we suffered complete database corruption. Interestingly, as abruptly as the attack occurred it ceased and we can say not without a certain guardedness that the work of decoding continues, albeit slowly. We are working on ways to authenticate the output while at the same time further hardening our defenses around the location of the capsule.

If you are reading this, we have also proposed a series of boomerang attacks for the mad world.

The ACC chose its landing site and lightly approaching outer atmosphere rings, began the descent that would bring it to a round fruit-yellow marsh bordering upon what seemed a deep crimson lake, thereby accomplishing the penultimate milestone of its ancient mandate.

The binary text ceases.

…...........................

The holotext begins.

Then there was no motion at all except the planet's own slow wobbly axial spinning and the more generous undulations and gyros of that particular cosmic system. The stillness was overwhelmingly compressing. The ACC, all sensory systems overloaded, felt the strain within its carapace as if its central equilibrium system were stressed beyond fail safe. So too, the podded human cargo registered wracked by the overwhelming pressures of this zero momentum stasis. Then there was registered a state shift, a momentary transferal of liquid, solid and gaseous systems.... then an equally abrupt reversal.

Simulated grav at high speeds was based on thousands of micro-assumptions; but the pull of Styxus 2 (2.4 E-G's) on the vertically parked ship and on its occupants resulted in a violent new steady state that seemed to rent them molecularly towards the heavy center of this firm planet. A large number of fatal fissures had materialized in the ACC's core circuitry but worse felt was the way the fused elements metastasized, spreading to areas that had remained sound throughout the long ordeal, resulting in particle back-ups in significant areas of the machine brains, where simple molecular shifts irreversibly eroded the antique data assumptions they embodied. Thousands of silicon layers distributed in some of the most sensitive function areas melded together in surprisingly violent DNA-like reconfigurations that could not have been predicted by the scores of teams that had programmed the theory of this end moment.

Absolute quiet had ignited the machine's molecular core, fusion reversed polarity in quantum abruptness.... nothing stirred –a low whistling welled from deeply within the pitch dark habspace and then the ACC plunged soundly in the first deep hibernation of its own proper existentialism.

This nap would last, alas, for five thousand E-years until the writhing death dance of two nearby galaxies set off a chain of force fields that washed ever so slightly upon the trajectory of the third sun of Styxus 2, a large light green spectrum sphere cutting low across the planet's eastern sky that reactivated the machine guts of ACC-10G-10347 as it perched still in the dark.

Back in this time, there it sat closed hatch, nuclear unreactive, powered down for wide spectrum photon absorption in a part of the sky that had absorbed these particles before they reached the surface. Now because of the cosmic shift there was a small glimmer from that sun as its orbit shifted around its siblings. The ACC felt the pulses across its newly born sensory system. This set off a long process of subconscious optimization auto-reconfiguration. Each photon and electron had to be redirected to where it could be most effective in a new core survival strategy harmonic with the piecemeal directives that had fragmented like shards in an ancient force field. Unconsciously, the ACC took stock, made circuit switches, amended static memory …... fused and refused.

That long prior breakdown in the ACC's ability to function had left the band of carbon-base automatons in its stomach much on its own untutored resources. The elegant PSYCULT application which was at the core of the feasibility of the debarkation routine for the helpless breathers was all but off-line. Static memory persisted in accessible flashes like pixels against the boundaries of a screen field. Their fetus-like minds gasped for input. And yet they stirred, moved, stood and ambulated about. They looked out at each other with nary self recognition.

The abridged PSYCULT flashed on... an anthem of futile pictures and sounds before their dulled sense organs meant to stimulate DNA amended cultural memory configurations. The ACC went into deeper hibernation, internal functions all but shut down. It had no mission.

The breathers followed their routine, detethered from their vital system umbilicals, and achieved their movement routines. Their was an ignited consciousness and there began consciousness-directed activities. They would move about, they would activate muscle systems, they would make language and they would acknowledge each other's existence in the stuttering pitch darkness..

They did their routines, did their routines, did their routines. They listened, they saw, they communicated to each other all so very languidly. They breathed the atmosphere of ACC's internal oxygen generators, units that were designed to run out, they digested the intravenous nutrition even as they learned to insert nutrients orally. And they slept long sleeps still tethered despite the directive to wean. This was to be a still birth.

And still the ACC slept.

We have given those people Mr. Robert Platte (see: Why We Have not yet Published) pretends to represent a little time to get back to us and have heard nothing. With that, we have decided to go ahead and publish the manuscript that recently came into our hands. We dispute that there is anything illegal or of security concern to the document and that there is a rival legitimate claim to publishing rights.

For context, we will repeat the present rights holder's claim that the work is a machine translation of binary code inscribed in a capsule that supposedly fell into the Arizona desert (see the anti-prologue) highlands some time after 1945. The author claims the capsule was discovered, then disappeared back in the early 1970's and that this “translation” we are calling a machinuscript has been recently rediscovered in Luzerne, Switzerland.

We have made no editorial changes or edits to the hard copy as we received it.

Pasqualino Pasquino

Editor

The Dymaxion Web

To: Mr. Robert Platte

c/o Federal Bureau of Investigation

Dear Sir,

You will be, no doubt, little surprised to learn that the entire story leading to the upcoming release of the “Eggn manuscript”, at eggtothenth.com has been a concoction to enhance the mystery surrounding this work of fiction. Yes, the urban legend surrounding the purported location of a mysterious capsule near White Sands, if this event ever really did take place, has been co-opted strictly for the purpose of embroidering a bit of verisimilitude around a story inspired, so we have been told, by the work of Jules Verne.

Just as the incidents surrounding the Roswell story have been adapted by so many authors and publishers, it was the publisher's assumption that there was no harm in the author taking the “Capsule” story and using it for his own purposes. We apologize if this has caused alarm bells to be raised within certain circles, if that really be the case (something we doubt).

Be informed that as far as we were and remain concerned, the events previously described in the item entitled "Anti-Prologue" were made up entirely out of whole cloth. The author was not attempting to dupe us in this matter, and we were not attempting to dupe our readers.

Further, we concur with the Eggn author that the kind of thinking that went into the Roswell story is outdated and somewhat illogical, much more a reflection of the paranoia generated during the Cold War by certain factions within the political spectrum.

Why, for instance, would the US Government continue to this day to hide the fact that beings from outer space had been discovered in a location near the area of the first nuclear test explosion?

From a scientific perspective, the crash landing, much less the successful cover up, of highly advanced beings is extremely dubious. Even at close to the speed of light, these particular beings and their flying saucer would certainly have had to have already been positioned in the vicinity of our solar system, before even the first wireless signals were sent into space. After all, Alpha Centauri, our nearest neighboring sun, is 4.6 light years distant.

The Roswell beings would have had to be very near neighbors in our own solar system and in possession of an extremely advanced form of propulsion to get here in a reasonable amount of time. Assuming, then, that such an advanced civilization had evolved in this close proximity, we might make a reasonably sound statistical deduction that intelligent life is an inordinately common universal phenomenon and that there are hundreds of thousands of such civilizations just in our own corner of the galaxy. Further, their communications would require electromagnetic wavelengths. In recent years, tens of millions of dollars have been spent in vain by the government through NASA and universities in the quest to capture any signal of intelligent communication in the galaxy.

Are we to suppose that NASA at the height of its prestige would not have been able to penetrate the veil of secrecy around something as significant as the very well known Roswell story and that no Administration hence has had the power to crack that secrecy? After all, the possibilities of backward engineering alone would make the discovery invaluable to science, not to mention government scientists working to solve the propulsion and speed problems that plague today's deep space program.

We feel confident that the publication of Eggn can be of absolutely no interest to any organization that you (Platte) purport to represent. The author assures us that this is a work of fiction and that the time capsule depicted in the "Anti-Prologue" is a metaphor for the period between its authorship and the present dates of first publication.

We therefore defy you to demonstrate any evidence that gives you a legitimate platform to make any of your various charges. Further, you have 5 days from today to make those charges known to us.

Pascal Pasquino

Chief Editor, Fiction

The Dymaxion Web

We agreed to meet him in the bar of the Mayflower Hotel at 3 the following Monday, a time, we noted, when the spacious, somewhat dimly lit bar is usually quite empty.

There was quite a bit of snow on the ground after the weekend's blizzard that had shut down all of the area, including the three airports. The underground portion of the Metro was working, though quite sporadically. Still, we managed to start out early and only walked in from the hotel lobby entrance about 15 minutes late. Our Mr. Platte was sitting in an isolated corner booth; we told him he would recognize us as a mature couple and that I would be wearing a brown Borsalino. A man stood up and somewhat discretely signaled us over to his booth. It was clear from that single movement that this was a figure accustomed to going unnoticed. Skin pasty, hair partially gray, he wore a gray worsted suit, vaguely yellowed white shirt, nondescript tie and an unreadable demeanor. Strangely, as we approached him, we picked up the scent of a particularly old fashioned after-shave lotion. I could see my companion's nostrils flare slightly as she caught the first whiffs.

When Platte didn't offer his card, it was also clear that this was going to be an unusual business meeting. Particularly after we offered him ours and there was no reciprocity. Our host had already got a tall, colorless drink that fizzled slowly on the dark table in front of him. He took a seat first, then offered his hand. We sat down with our backs to the room and began with some very small weather talk. Then Platte managed to get the attention of the waiter and we ordered a couple of tap pints.

“Look,” I said, “ I don't know who you are or what you want so it's time you put your cards on the table, we've got a lot of things to do today and little interest in delaying our plans.”

“Well,” said Platte, “I'm not sure you'll welcome this but I am here representing people who believe you have no right whatsoever to the material you're planning to publish. The capsule was, as your research indicated, found by a young man who should have turned it over to his employer, the government. Had he, this hoax would never have seen the light of day. You my friend have been duped. There is nothing to the capsule except that it is US Government property found in a sensitive locale.”

“Government property?”

“That's what this all about. And if you persist in going forward with this scheme you will no doubt face serious consequences.”

“Did you say you represented individuals or are you government agent of some kind?”

“All you will hear from me for now is that you have no right to publish this so-called translation that you are calling EggN. You've already indicated that the capsule was probably stolen or taken inappropriately out of a locker at ASU and that it was found by a US Park Service employee. Even if you have gone ahead and got the permission of that former employee –and let us all be clear that the name Thomas Doolittle is as much of a fiction as your recount of its discovery-- you would have no right to the contents.”

“Well, what would you say if we contended that the manuscript, itself is a work of fiction, and the introduction we published was part of that fiction?”

“I am not here to play games with you, sir.”

Throughout, Platte spoke his lines without showing the slightest emotion, as if he himself had preprogrammed our responses.

We paused the conversation long enough to allow the drinks to be delivered and as soon as we were again out of earshot of anyone in the bar (though clearly not that of the video tape being made of the meeting) we picked it up.

“Are you going to say who you are, who you represent and provide the property identity? Otherwise, my inclination is to end this conversation right here.”

Platte's response was slow and menacing: “You will be hearing more from us shortly, in the meantime you would be more than prudent in holding up on your plans to make public this ridiculous work.”

And so, readers, we apologize for failing to follow up with our promise to publish chapter by chapter the translation now in our hands.

We have decided that we have no choice for the moment other then to take the menaces of this man called Platte seriously. In the meantime we have taken precautions to protect the manuscript's multiple whereabouts from theft or intrusion. We will be talking to legal representation and other Article 1 advocacy groups. There is, of course, no way we can protect ourselves from denial of service attacks without a certain amount of aid from certain groups.

Truth in publishing: This is not the script for some modern day film noir, even if we have perhaps been seeing too many in recent weeks.