The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect (2 page)
Caroline scowled. None of them even pre-Change -- Prime Intellect would have noted it if they were. Babes hoping to get lucky and impress her. The third one was interesting, though; he must have done something noteworthy to garner a 9 rating in so many exhibitions.
| How old is #3? |
| 22 years |
Caroline blinked. It was hard for her to understand the souls who continued to feel a need, even after hundreds of years, to be fruitful and multiply. Actually encountering someone so young made her feel a little creepy. Calculating backward, she wondered what manner of psychotic would have bothered to have a child after 568 years of
Cyberlife
.
| Background? |
| Timothy Carroll was born to orthodox Catholic parents who live with like-minded people in a communally designed Earthlike world. He signed for independence at age 14 and has spent most of his time Death Jockeying since. He is considered very imaginative and takes an artistic approach. Thirty-seven of his exhibitions have been in the Authentic class. |
| But he's also into |
| He is young and experimental. He may outgrow this interest in Death sports when he has exhausted his rebellious streak. |
| You're a computer. How the fuck would you know? |
Prime Intellect didn't reply; it had learned that the best response to her jabs was to ignore them. It had long ago given up trying to reform her. She knew it did not like Death Jockeys one little bit, if a computer could even be said to "like" or "dislike" anything. And in Caroline's case the feeling was certainly mutual.In her fantasies, she dreamed of having the power to give it a case of heartburn so big its gears would stop turning.Most people did not share Caroline's distaste for the Omniscient One. A great many worshipped it, despite its apparent embarrassment over the fact. But why not? It could and would do damn near anything you asked, as long as it didn't affect anyone else. And even that was open to negotiation with the other people you might want to involve. There were no noticeable limits to its power and it never asked why. Caroline knew a whole crowd of people who preferred for Prime Intellect to manifest itself in the form of an attractive member of the opposite sex. Prime Intellect was nothing less than the perfect God, made incarnate by the power of technology. Caroline couldn't see how fucking God was less perverted than being death-obsessed, but hey, there it was.Caroline hadn't been all that impressed with God even in the days before Lawrence had brought it forth in his own image. She preferred to keep it in its place. It was just a computer. If you didn't keep that thought
firmly
in your mind it was too easy to start thinking of it as human, and that was the first step toward forgetting. Caroline didn't want to forget. And she didn't need to fuck Prime Intellect to get her jollies anyway. She could get her jollies from actual people. She only communicated with it at all when she had to, through the screen, keyboard, and a few curt spoken and
subvocal
commands.