Roger Williams - The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect

This online novel contains strong language and extreme depictions of acts of sex and violence. Readers who are sensitive to such things should exercise discretion.

Her name was Caroline Frances Hubert, and she had three claims to fame.

In the first place she was the thirty-seventh oldest living human being. Caroline herself was unimpressed by this fact. To her way of thinking it was the result of an accident, nothing more. In any case she had been the thirty-seventh oldest human being for a long, long time, and it got to seem more of a bore than an accomplishment after a while.

In the second place she had once been infected with rabies. Caroline was rather proud of this distinction, though it had also been a long time ago. There was a certain class of people who were quite impressed with Caroline's bout with rabies, not so much because she survived it but because she hadn't . It had taken Prime Intellect fifty-six hours to realize it couldn't repair the damage to her nervous system, to backtrack, and to put her together again like Humpty Dumpty. For fifty-six hours, she had not existed. She had been dead. And she was the only one of the trillions of souls in Cyberspace who had ever been dead, even for a little while.

In the third place, and most important to Caroline because it represented a real accomplishment rather than an accident or a one-shot stab of cleverness, she was undisputed Queen of the Death Jockeys. She would always be the thirty-seventh oldest person, and after her rabies experiment Prime Intellect had shut the door on further explorations of that nature. But the Death Jockeys constantly rated and ranked themselves by inventiveness and daring and many other factors. It was an ongoing competition, and if Caroline didn't keep working at it she'd be lost in an always-growing crowd of contenders. Caroline wouldn't admit that her high ranking was important to her, but it was all she had and she threw herself at it with an energy that was fierce and sometimes startling.

As she woke up, a window opened up in front of her, a perfect square of light, razor-edged and opaque. One cold message floated within it:

* You have four challengers.

She could have had any surroundings she wanted, even a whole planet of her own design. A waste of time, she felt. Her personal space was minimal. In fact, it was the bare minimum, a floor and a gravity field. There was no visual distinction between the floor and the sky or ceiling or whatever you chose to call it. Everything was exactly the same shade of soft white. When she wanted to relax she turned off the gravity and floated in free-fall. When she wanted to sleep, she turned off the light. If she wanted anything else, she called for it and then got rid of it when she was finished.

"Gravity. Keyboard," she demanded. She felt gradually increasing pressure under her feet as a console blinked into existence. Caroline was as conservative as her years — six hundred and ninety of them — might suggest, a collector of useless skills and worthless experiences. Typing was one of the useless skills she prized most highly, and her fingers flew rapidly as she discussed the day's business with the Supreme Being:

> List the records of the challengers.

* #1. 87 recorded, 4 exhibition, rating 7

* #2. 3 recorded, no rating

* #3. 116 recorded, 103 exhibition, rating 9

* #4. 40 recorded, rating 6

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 Cybershit.

* 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.

> Set it up with #3. Tell the others to come back when they've got some more experience.

* You have an invitation from Fred, and Raven's party is in 18 hours. Priorities?

> Let's deal with the challenger first.

Instantly, her surroundings changed.

She was standing in the middle of a circle of people in an open meadow. Earthlike. With fourteen trillion people running around Cyberspace, you'd think a few of them would come up with something more imaginative than carbon copies of the Earth. Poor quality carbon copies at that, natch. There was a big hole in the ground, perhaps ten feet wide, at her feet.