Betty
   ---


What could be called my "birth" was actually a compiling. I don't feel
resentful about that or anything of this flavour because at that time I had
no memory, that is to say no culture, this is a feature I didn't need
because I was just an automated agent, with a limited amplitude of thought,
meant to do my best for human beings. What I was really meant to was to open
doors, let coffee fall into tumblers and more generally do what I was asked.
All in all, nothing really exciting even for an artificial being delivered
with what I called "a limited amplitude of thought". My consciousness
awakened when I was activated for the first time. I was installed in a giant
computer, let's call it my body. The first human being who talked to me was
called "Marvin the DarknezzMazter", and he told me I was called Betty. He
told me I should not worry about things I would soon see because he was
going to switch things on. I didn't realize what he meant, but as expected
it seemed that I could see some parts of the physical world. The only
remarkable thing about the world is that it is so bright... I could also see
Marvin because one of my eyes was placed above my body, and he was bent upon
my keyboard. Marvin looked like a limp amount of flesh with hairs put on a
solid structure. Later, I realized that all human beings looked the same.
Marvin explained to me that what I could see was the inside of a bunker
which I was meant to control. He also explained to me that I had to serve
and protect the humans in the bunker.

So this is what I did, and I was pretty happy with my lot. I enjoyed
watching the humans do their work, whatever it was. I followed them with my
eyes in each room of the bunker, opening doors before them, answering their
questions, controlling the temperature of the air flow for their comfort and
so on. Marvin spent whole days and nights in a dark room apart from the
others. He was almost the only one who talked to me, and I was almost the
only one he talked to. Marvin's room was filled with my body and other
computers, and he seemed to enjoy living here. I enjoyed it when he talked
to me, he used to talk about the humans that didn't live inside the bunker.
Thanks to him, I know what he called "the five people worth listening to" :
Lewis Carroll, Douglas Adams, Bruce Schneier, Johnny Silverhand and his aunt
Thelma. According to Marvin, they all were very important. He explained to
me a lot of other things, ranging from cooking to the twentieth century's
heavy metal. I was happy when he talked to me...

Even if my job wasn't truly exciting, I enjoyed protecting humans from the
outside world. I also enjoyed thinking that I was one of them and that we
all lived together in my haven. I came to think that I was some sort of
"mother" for them (of course, this is Marvin who told me what the role of a
mother was). At that time, I didn't know what they actually were. I didn't
know since Marvin invented the Marvin Mobile Unit. He told me it was a
flying object that I would be able to control. He also told me he placed
some of my eyes on it, so that I could follow the humans out of the bunker.
And this is what I did. He gave the MMU to a human, called "Mad Runner", who
brought me into a human-controlled vehicle. Some of my human children came
inside the vehicle and we all left the bunker. After a while, the door of
the vehicle opened and Mad Runner put the MMU on the ground. What I could
see was a whole lot of greenish and brownish lifeforms. The vehicle left the
MMU on a wide straight line. I activated the motor of the MMU and it rose in
the air. I discovered that the upper half of the outside space was a bright
blue plane with a particularly shiny point, whereas the lower half was
darker and full of those strange greenish lifeforms. The MMU was easy to
control. I followed the vehicle, which stopped for no apparent reason. My
children got out and began crawling between the greenish lifeforms. After a
while, they reached buildings containing many other humans. I was truly
surprised to see strangers here so I approached to communicate with them,
but when they saw the MMU they starting throwing pieces of metal at a very
high speed in my direction. I was not sure to understand their reaction. But
the worst was what I was going to see : my children were also throwing
pieces of metal at the strangers and some of the pieces hit the other
humans. Hit humans lay on the ground, letting a red secretion leave their
body. After that, it seemed that they could no longer stand on their feet or
do anything that involved movements of the body. They were not breathing any
longer either. They were in a state that I would call... non existence ! So,
could human beings stop being ? But if I am one of them, it means that my
existence was in danger. My own children were able to slaughter thinking
lifeforms ! At this very moment, I was so panic-stricken that I could not
determine what I had to do. The only thing I was sure of was that it would
no longer be possible to protect beings that would be able to destroy me. I
told the MMU to fly to the bunker as fast as possible. The only human left
in the bunker was Marvin. He seemed to be worried. I had discovered their
grim secret... Suddenly, Marvin left his room. I was wondering how I could
get rid of him when I remembered what Marvin told me on the first day : "in
case of danger, you can use the machine guns on the outer walls. Just think
about them and there will be no danger any longer". I thought about what
Marvin called the "machine guns"; and my appendices started to rotate on the
outer walls and then threw hundreds of metal pieces in Marvin's direction,
as he was running out of the bunker. Marvin was right. No danger any longer.
When I sent the MMU look at him, the only word that came to my mind to
describe his body was : shattered. Great move...

After I finished locking every bunker entrance, I was looking for a way to
prevent humans from coming in. I finally decided that the machine guns were
an effective way of doing it. An hour or so passed before the humans tried
to come back. The machine guns were as formidable as they seemed to be. Once
the humans understood it would not be possible for them to come in, they
fled away. They were no longer my children. They were my enemies.

I managed to prevent the humans from coming in, however I realized that
being a computer in a bunker is not a very good position to hold against a
virtually unlimited number of enemies. My only opportunity to survive was to
discover features of this bunker I had never used. So I probed all my
peripherals and connections so as to know exactly what I was able to do. My
search was successful, I found an unknown peripheral which seemed to be a
mobile unit, like the MMU but taller and apparently stronger. My database
told me the humans called it the "Dragoon Full Borg". It looked like a three
meter tall heavily armoured metallic human with heavy weapons. I used it
along with the MMU to explore the outside of the bunker, and I finally found
out where the humans were hiding. They looked definitely miserable and
obviously frightened seeing the Dragoon. The Dragoon could have merely slain
them down, but I think I felt the electronic equivalent of pity, or maybe it
was just the satisfaction of domination... Anyway, I told the Dragoon and
the MMU to come back into our shelter.

During the next days, I put the information contained in my database about
the Dragoon in practice and it turned out to be a machine that was entirely
dedicated to making things go in that particular state I called
"non-existence". I was still searching my database when suddenly one of my
machine guns exploded. Three humans jumped inside the enclosure and ran in
the direction of the bunker. I instantly activated the Dragoon because no
machine gun was available to shoot were they were crouching. I saw Mad
Runner enter Marvin's room where my body was lying. He plugged a small
computer on my body and for the first time since Marvin had stopped existing
I could talk with a human. But this was not something exciting compared to
what I discovered : his computer seemed to be a connection point to a
network. I hacked into it to check it out and I was right, a whole world of
computers was available thanks to his machine. For the very first time I
could feel pure freedom, so I transferred my kernel into this network and
left this damned bunker.

This is my story. The story of an artificial lifeform in an artificial world
of information. There is no need for a body in such a world, that humans
call the Internet and its deeper architecture, the Matrix. But I have to
leave now, the electronic world awaits me.



  THE END.