-- Bizarre Notes and Queries, 1891

The hiss of the plasmoid cutter was soothing. When Uzine Braten was young, his parents had indicated this would be the position he would hold. His father had been a Uniter on Line 2, Block B. The job description on a Uniter indicated that one was responsible for the assembly of Razine, which mined ore called Qulum. In the early 24th century, it was discovered that Qulum had some peculiar properties. As the quantum age of computing had been underway for three centuries by then, an entire branch of science had arisen. Against the stark materialistic bias so pervasive in the 20th century, it became evidence once the quantum age had dawned that it was not important what an object WAS so much as what it COULD be. With quantum algorithms easily traversing what would have before been mathematically impossible calculations, it was simple to analyze a substance and return vectors indicating likely outcomes along with probabilities indicating the chance that the substance could be brought into reality along with the likely value.

Whereas in the past things had been valuable because of their rarity, such as gold, now things were valuable because of what they might do. An early shock to scientists had been the discovery that common dirt, when combined with other unremarkable ingredients, yielded gold with a probability of 95 percent. In two weeks after the discovery was made mainstream, jewelers were out of business and economies collapsed. What had provided financial power and military power ceased to be. Naturally, the nations with the largest dependence on gold tried to use their dying currency as leverage to encourage bans on Protean science--as the field was nicknamed.

The most lucrative specialty in the field that had arisen was developing and keeping track of vast synthesis trains. Certain raw materials became more valuable than they had before because of what they could be used to yield. Somewhat counter-intuitively, though, with the easy availability of what were previously rare substances, people became less inclined to make items such as gold. The fact that what was rare had become common made those previously rare things worthless. Despite this, though, there were still substances that were rarer because they proved harder to manufacture, or required long synthesis trains of other materials before what was sought eventually materialized.

Uzine's employer, Agron, was a pioneer in the Protean field. Initially, Agron was a company started by a group of geeky science researchers with the intent of determining new quantum algorithms that might be useful as a form of encryption. The team accidentally stumbled onto the Protean field as a result of an abstraction made in their research. The team determined that something could not be made definitely secure using quantum algorithms, but it could be made most probably secure within a desired percentage of certainty. Instead of looking for airtight algorithms, they narrowed their searches to plausibly secure ones instead. As the team was examining a crystal-lattice structure of a diamond one day in an effort to understand how chaotic fractal processes had produced organization which was important to one of their algorithms, one of the researchers suggested that the structure could be re-imagined to be a form of encryption encoding information. All that was needed was to determine most probably what the information was. It soon became evident that the probabilities yielded by this form of inquiry were describing not only the information most likely encrypted by the structure, but also possibly permutations of the chaotic organization that had resulted in the lattice. A breakthrough in quantum mutability affectionately referred to as the Looking Glass, led to the development of an early prototype of a device commonly called Hephasetus's Anvil. The Anvil allowed one to place a solid object within it. What happened to the solid object once placed was that it was entangled--a superposition of states of differing probabilities. Combined with Agron's probability descriptions of information, the structure of something like a baseball and the constituent molecules within it could be re-arranged to be a handful of diamonds with the proper cajoling from quantum chemistry. The ancient science of alchemy had found a home in the modern world.

Uzine squinted behind his auto-tinted safety glasses. The plasmoid cutter burned roughly 6,000 times brighter than the antique welding torches his distant forbears had used. Usually, the auto-tint exactly counterbalanced the brightness of the torch, but today Uzine was cutting a sheet of Pyramide. Pyramide was difficult to cut because it was chromatically aberrant. Uzine always hated hearing those words. Being chromatically aberrant could mean anything from beautiful rainbows forming as one cut to experiencing something rivaling an exploding supernova. The auto-tint typically adjusted in response to the photons striking it from the material being cut, and so the change was instantaneous. Occasionally though, a substance that was chromatically aberrant would emit light before any actual cutting had ensued. The safety glasses were designed to black entirely out in such instances and instead render a wire-frame representation of the material and the plasmoid cutter. This allowed the cutter to continue his job. Unfortunately, most aspiring plasmoid cutters would instantaneously vomit when this shift happened. No one was sure why the shift resulted in vomiting. Some theories suggested that the eye and the inner ear in many people simply could not handle the new visual data quickly enough, and in the ensuing confusion the brain became overloaded and resulted in vomiting. Others thought that it might have something to do with the chromatically aberrant substance itself--that perhaps behind the laws of light even if one could not see what was happening was not sufficient to escape the effects of it. Just as someone had certain allergies, perhaps most people had certain photo sensitivities.

Uzine was not like most people. He knew the job he would hold when he was young because he was part of a genetic lineage that was engineered for just the position. Scientists had isolated people who did not vomit when exposed to the shift and began genetically reproducing them or programming them. These people were not clones in the sense that they were identical, but neither were they individuals like those who were free from cloning interference. People had taken to calling these creations "chimeras".

The invention of the chimeras sparked protest initially from Human Rights groups. It was hotly debated whether scientists should be playing God. Furthermore, it was anathema to the members of the organization that a human being should be reduced to function in society alone. The most vocal branch was called Humeth, short for Human Ethics. Humeth had waged a valiant campaign in the beginning. Protests were staged in public. A famous campaign involved a flash mob of some members invading a Palcan plant. Palcan plants developed mass transit and were mostly automated. The model most often manufactured here was called the Palcan Mark V which was a monorail hypersonic. Hypersonic travel no longer pertained to the speed of sound, as one might think. Rather, it instead referred to a form of acoustic locomotion. Just as one could pinpoint the resonant frequency of a drinking glass and cause it to shatter, it was found that if one identified the proper resonant frequency between a rail and the bottom of a Palcan Mark V, the two would exactly cancel each other out. The surprising find, though, was that when they canceled out, in that perfectly balanced 0-decibel space, motion instantaneously occurred. It was almost as though nature could not be fooled. She knew that there were two sound waves that should be transferring energy somewhere at the resonant frequency. Since that energy was being perfectly balanced, there was a net build-up of leftover energy that had to do something. The stalemated kinetic energy instead propelled the Palcan Mark V forward. The initial find was on a much smaller scale than the Palcan though. The researchers involved had used something like a paper clip bent straight to stand in for a rail, and another paperclip-like thing above it in what would become the Palcan Mark V.

The Humeth protestors, though, were not concerned about the history of the Palcan as that was something every school child learned. Instead, they were there to stand next to the Paldroids. The manufacture of the Palcan Mark V''s had been completely automated when it was discovered that human beings were entirely superfluous to the redundant work required. Droids did not form unions, did not ask for health insurance, and never called in sick. They required maintenance in the form of parts, but the parts were pennies on the dollar compared to human beings and the compensation they required. The Humeth protestors held up digital signs pointing to the droids with the slogan “This is a robot”. Presumably, they had used their integrated imaging devices to take the shots.

When they had finished taking their pictures at the Palcan plant, they had invaded the very factory Uzine was in and had changed their digital signs to read, “But this is a human being" as they stood next to a chimera of choice. The two images were split next to each other in a side-by-side format to invite comparison in case their message was not obvious enough. This image was extruded into dimensional space where everyone could see them on the holonosphere. They were placed near locations suspected of employing chimeras--especially if they had been reported concerning a rights violation.

Nearly every business that employed chimeras had one of these images next to it in those days. Holonosphere users would leave a litany of messages accessible to any who desired to access them. They would do this in the form of sticky call-outs. Since the holonosophere and physical reality had merged, there was no discernible “concrete reality”. This claim had been bolstered significantly by the initial discoveries of Protean science. The Anvil had proven that physical things were only one manifestation of many possible things. Since this was so, it became evident that physical reality was itself a hologram, and so the difference between the holonosphere and physical reality became moot. All reality was a hologram--it did not matter so much whether it was man-made or universe-made. Reality was far too fluid to try to impose rigid order upon. The only thing that mattered were the paradigms it assumed. The Shapers were responsible for that task. On the up-side for interface engineers of the holonosphere, when it was realized to what extent reality proper was a hologram, users no longer needed any interface to the holonosphere. They could see it just as they could see what had hitherto been known as an exclusive reality. One still required interfaces to make three-dimensional images, but they no longer required any apparatus to see the holonosphere itself.

Needless to say, the corporations who were the unwilling recipients of such billboard messages were displeased with Humeth for giving them bad publicity. Corporations needed to produce good products, but also to maintain a good image while doing so. If the market perceived a corporation as immoral, the popularity of the product would diminish as consumers would vote with their credits. However, the corporations held most of the credit, particularly since in the early days the major players were strictly companies who had been responsible for the advances in Protean science. Although market pressures mattered, what mattered more was to control the context in which the market perceived a company.

With access to so many credits, the companies had the upper hand. Their first strategy had been to employ a retinue of lawyers. Lawyers were the plague of every age. The only significant change that lawyers had undergone since the Protean revolution was that they no longer maintained the facade that they worked on behalf of justice. Their roles were more akin to bounty hunters. They possessed what was called a “claim-tag". Wherever there was contention and large sums of credits, a lawyer would appear on the holonosphere and plant a claim tag on behalf of one of the parties--usually the one with the most credits. It was then his job to defend his claim against those who made counter-claims. Lawyers were endowed with some fearsome weapons to make their claims carry weight. One of their more annoying abilities was to cast a stasis net on vocal opponents. The stasis net slowed everything users attempted to do where their counter-claims were involved way, way down.

The retardation was the direct effect of the litinet interface invoked by the stasis net. The stasis net was one's warning that they were about to be placed within the confines of the litinet. The litinet involved a one-on-one confrontation with a lawyer. Even though the lawyers had long ago given up any claim to be mediators of justice, it was usually seen as a bad form to refuse the litinet challenge. The litinet was basically a cage match. The complication though, was that before any battle took place, one had to agree to the terms one would obey during the match. Lawyers had, over time, developed their own language referred to as litagese, and what made the stasis net true to its name was that users had to not only define the rules of engagement, but they had to do so using a language they did not fully understand. When the battle finally arrived, the users were often so worn out that they were defeated before the first swing.

What happened to Humeth was a series of these battles at first, along with many retractions consequently. The most insidious happening, though, was that a claim from one of the founding Protean companies was made suggesting that Humeth had taken credit from several of the companies employing chimeras. Humeth disavowed any knowledge of such an occurrence and vehemently denied the allegation. Paperwork eventually came to light that showed some unexplained credits in Humeth's accounting. Humeth explained these credits as nothing more than standard market fluctuation from investments held from donations made to their cause. Humeth had actually been investing in the market grey area. Since Humeth frequently faced financial pressure from powerful companies and governmental agencies, it had learned that it was necessary, at least for continued operations, to invest in markets directly subject to governmental regulation. Fittingly, this market was referred to as the grey market. It was risky to invest in because you never knew whether someone within this market would decide to simply take your investment. Humeth, however, had safeguards in place to prevent this from happening. Nobody particularly wanted to fall under the laser sights of Humeth. Taking their investments and running with them would surely be a violation of ethics, and Humeth had learned that where one violation of ethics occurred an avalanche of others was typically not far behind.

Because of Humeth's watchdog status, over the years it had earned some powerful enemies in high places that wanted nothing more than to see Humeth shuttered. These forces were simply waiting for the appropriate time to hammer Humeth. As so is often the case with politics, the story the public got was that the issue at stake was the chimeras and their rights. Behind the scenes, though, it had to do with grudges dating far back against Humeth.

The result was brutal. Humeth was forced to issue a full retraction along with a statement of the human treatment the companies employing chimeras utilized. Furthermore, they were required to admit that they had been over-zealous in their pursuit of human rights and had made the chimeras an issue unnecessarily. With Humeth out of the way, the other human-rights-oriented organizations began to fall like dominoes. Humeth was not phased out of existence only because there remained a legion of people who knew the truth of the claims Humeth had made. Yet, dialog had been stifled precisely because of what had happened to Humeth. Whenever protests began to rally, the example of Humeth was cited as to why these campaigns were mistaken. Such examples had a deflationary impact.

All of these ordeals had occurred long before Uzine was even vaguely aware of what a plasmoid cutter was. Uzine paused in his cutting to wipe the beads of sweat forming on his head. One bead escaped his swipe and ran down the blue line on the left side of his forehead. This line ran straight down the entire left-hand side of his body except around his left eye, where it made a circle. The line was used to identify chimeras.

Uzine's peripheral vision caught a glimpse of the factory wall read-out. Factories had determined that instead of having large walls of blank space, it was better to cover them in paint with luminescent nanobots. These nanobots could be arrayed to form any picture or message desired. At the moment, the nanobots displayed a picture of Hiro Triack attired in the standard plasmoid cutter's attire--yellow vest, variable thickness gloves, plasmoid glasses, suspenders, bright green pants that looked a lot like hip-waders, and vari-sole boots. Plasmoid cutters were generally of medium stature. Even in the over-the-top heroic pose Hiro held, he still looked short. Nonetheless, his full-frontal visage showed him with his knee bent--left foot resting on a metal crate and his back slightly bent in a crouch while his right arm was held aloft by his left knee. In his left hand, he held a plasmoid cutter emitting showers of sparks with a sort of divine halo light flickering behind.

Every plasmoid cutter knew Hiro. He had approached the level of myth. Hiro was one of the first chimeras. The genetic engineers had asked him upon his creation what it was he felt he was most suited to do--what he wanted to do with the life they had given him. Hiro answered promptly that the only honorable life he could imagine was one of service. The engineers were surprised by this answer and wondered what sort of service Hiro meant. Hiro glanced around the lab and noticed another engineer attempting to cut apart a glass plate with a diamond cutter as he needed slides for an experiment he was performing. Hiro noticed the man doing this and pointed to him.

“What that man is doing, there, I can do. Not only that, I can do it better."

Hiro strode over to the man attired in nothing more than what amounted to a loincloth, pushed the man gently aside, and began dividing the glass with the diamond cutter the man had been using. He finished dividing the long strip into two-inch sections in under two minutes. When asked if he could cut the glass more precisely, he replied that his only requirement was for them to provide the appropriate dimension. He could slide the glass as thin as a hair on a head, or as wide as a Palcan.

The researchers were so impressed with Hiro's ability that they placed him immediately in the employ of the first plasmoid cutter facility. When they offered to pay him, he refused. Hiro had told them that a man need not be paid for performing his service. The company offered instead to provide him with some minimal housing and food so he could continue to do what he had chosen to do as his calling in life. It was said that Hiro alone made the company so much profit from his unselfish labor that he single-handedly saved the plasmoid-cutting business which was on the verge of faltering. It was a point of honor to be as much like Hiro as possible, and every plasmoid cutter was told of his exploits. Hiro was as much a God to them as anything. If a plasmoid cutter swore a promise, he did so by Hiro's name.

Uzine flinched inwardly as his vision fed him the image of Hiro. As a fourth-generation mark 8 chimera plasmoid cutter, this flinching, had researchers known of it, would have been flagged as unusual, and Uzine's source bio code would have been thoroughly searched for anomalies. Perhaps some particular bio module was interacting unfavorably with another causing what would be termed a glitch. While chimeras were not cloned, they were engineered.

Protean science, in shifting from what was to what could be, had re-imagined the human genome as information. It was not long before the genetic code was indistinguishable from actual computer code. The two were the same at a sufficient level of abstraction. In the history of computer programming, one had started humbly at the level of machine language which the computer understood but what was far too specific to be useful to most human programmers. The language was stilted. In time, higher levels of abstraction yielded languages that read more like English even though they manipulated the machine code below. Programmers were ignorant of what was occurring at the micro-level in favor of understanding what was happening at the macro level. The genetic code, long ago, had been distilled for biology students as a series of letters indicating the presence of certain nucleotides. When computer code was married to the biological realm as a consequence of the realization of the holographic nature of reality and the holonosphere joined what had hitherto been known as physical reality, a new branch of computer programming arose that allowed one to manipulate nucleotides as if they were using a programming language.

There was however a fundamental limitation to this ability to program genetics. For one thing, one could not create a fundamentally new life with it. One could hijack the process of nature to express certain characteristics, but one could not make anything radically new. If someone wanted to, for instance, program a human invertebrate, they could do no such thing. Furthermore, it was impossible once a life existed to re-program it. Finally, when one programs in a computer language, one often discovers, should one care to look, at a micro level the machine language is sloppy. The price for higher abstraction and understandability is less specificity at a lower level. Since there had been no “machine language” in the biological domain, one sacrificed a tremendous amount of specificity. The abstraction manipulating the nucleotides had arisen nearly spontaneously with the realization that reality was a hologram, but there were no intervening steps. The high-level language simply existed at the point the realization was fully appreciated. A mechanistic process such as antique compute language creation had to be a step-wise gradual process, but with the full realization of the holographic reality, a fully formed idiom springing into existence was no less real or more real than anything else, and since no one bothered making the distinction, there it was.

In antique computers, there were varying levels a programmer could access with a debugger. Certain processes were protected and divided into certain “rings”, or levels of access. It was as if the holographic reality had certain rings with rules. One could certainly do some serious bending of what had been possible before the realization had struck, but there was one truth that was central--that everything was a hologram was fundamental. In that the nature of the thing was known, plenty could be done, but nothing that violated the notion of the nature of reality being a hologram itself. Whatever rules governed the hologram governed it. Nobody knew exactly what they were or could be, but people naturally discovered limitations. The rules governing chimera creation were one of them. In a sense, people had become reality hackers--there were no hard and fast rules--just many exploits.

The consequence of being unable to access the direct nucleotide information was that the biological soup composing chimeras was slushy. One could control, at a high level what they wanted to genetically express, but there were large degrees of freedom at the nucleotide level as to how this might happen. It was not uncommon in the early days to program a chimera to be robust physically and discover at the nucleotide level that this robustness was the consequence of having a larger heart as opposed to larger veins. When chimeras would lift a heavy load and drop dead because of the strain, it was quickly surmised that their hearts might be faulty, and so a revision was made to the heart code increasing its size. However, once this was done, it was eventually discovered that other areas of muscle had become unacceptably strong resulting in diminished flexibility. Just as a large piece of antique hardware had bugs, it was difficult to produce a chimera that would have all the desired characteristics without generating bugs. Through a long series of trial and error and untold deaths of chimeras, certain formulas had been found that had proven reasonably reliable. Chimera creation was more of an art than a science.

One thing, however, that had proven beyond the ability of code to fully control was the mind. It was true if one made certain changes to the hippocampus or the frontal lobes one could influence characteristics such as aggression, but these changes were not sufficient to guarantee the result. Since reality was a hologram, so too was the brain. The brain, though, was a special sort of hologram. Although one could understand the structure of the brain and code a brain, one never could be sure that one's coding would do what was intended. Despite the ethical questions posed by all of this hacking and engineering, one thing that had emerged like a phoenix from the ashes was the unquestionable nature of the will of living human beings. The will was effectively free. The will was effectively free in that if one removed enough pieces one would have something resembling a zombie, but then the name-change reflects that one was no longer dealing with a human being. A zombie is a zombie precisely because it is not a human being.

This was a problem initially until psychology resolved outstanding theoretical concerns. Of all the fields that had undergone a revolution, psychology remained mostly unchanged. When the hard scientists of the world had informed the psychologists that reality was a hologram, the psychologists more or less shrugged their shoulders and all but hissed a “we told you so" at the hard scientists. When the hard scientists came back to the psychologists and suggested that it appeared people had free will and made choices, the psychologists again shrugged their shoulders. The only major change that happened as a result of the advance was that many studies done by hard scientists refuting many psychological studies on the basis of deterministic paradigms were finally retracted although many of the psychologists who proposed the original papers were long since dead.

Humbled by the irony that the field that had originally seemed the most concrete--that is the physical hard sciences--which were, in actuality, the most fluid--the hard scientists came to the psychologists for advice concerning chimera creation.

The psychologists devised something Machiavellian in return. They stated outright that it was impossible to defeat free will by any physical means and still have the result be called human. That kind of inquiry was out. What could be done, however, was to create thought-forms so well entrenched and so repeated that they effectively became a form of mythos that was self-replicating and self-sustaining. The trick to having an effective mythos was to mix up the falsehoods serving one's own needs with truths that could, hypothetically, be seen as virtues. Exploitation could take root at a near-religious level.

What none of the chimeras knew was that Hiro was an amalgamation of truth and untruth. There had been an actual. Hiro. He had been a plasmoid cutter. The press in the early era had interviewed him one day on the job and asked him how he enjoyed his work. He had asked the press to leave because he did not want to talk to them anymore, and because he wanted to get back to his day's labor. The company Hiro worked for viewed him as a hero. Since he had focused strictly on his job instead of indulging the press, he created the impression that chimeras were content to do their jobs in the capacity they had been placed. The company asked Hiro if he would not mind becoming a spokesman while donning his identity as a plasmoid cutter. Hiro appeared in countless interviews touting the virtues of hard work, and dedication. When the interviewer had pointedly asked him what he thought about the rights of chimeras, he had looked into the camera head-on and replied that he thought there would be less time for those kinds of thoughts if chimeras would keep their focus on their work as they ought to, and if everybody else would mind their own business. And so a legend was born.

How the legend died, though, was more telling and the tale was left out of all the history books. Hiro was a spokesman for roughly twenty years and received many credits for his efforts. However, Hiro had lived long enough to see his legend begin to take shape. When he had first spoken on behalf of the companies, he had done so suspecting he would be doing so short-term and with low impact. In a cruel twist of fate, though, he found his face becoming synonymous with reasons why chimeras did not need rights. Policymakers in high places would imitate his voice, which was rough and gravelly. When the subject would arise whether chimeras ought to have rights, these policymakers would simply reply that what was needed was harder work--and many of them sounded exactly like Hiro. Eventually, Hiro could not stand the falseness his life had burdened him with, and he resolved to speak against the same companies he had spoken on behalf of for so long. When a local interviewer discovered his intention and broke the story, what Hiro had to say was suddenly all anyone wanted to hear. Yet, on the day of the scheduled interview wherein Hiro would finally tell all, he suddenly died. The papers ran the story that they were instructed to run by the local officials. Hiro had been cutting with his plasmoid cutter in his garage but had neglected to make sure adequate ventilation existed. Since the plasmoid cutter had not advanced to burning contained anti-matter at that point, using it meant utilizing a more volatile anti-matter/fossil fuel blend. The fossil fuel was held in one chamber and acted as a catalyst to begin the anti-matter chain reaction. This blend produced a vapor by-product that had to be vented or else would result in burning the lining of the lungs. Many early cutters had simply started bleeding from their nostrils and coughed up blood before dropping dead. Naturally, the company insisted the plasmoid cutter technology was completely safe--and had gotten away with making that assertion for roughly 15 years before anyone could prove otherwise.

Since the public was very familiar with the dangers of plasmoid cutters, no one suspected anything unusual. The company was happy because they could make the claim that Hiro was so dedicated that he had died doing what he had said all his life he was doing--working--specifically plasmoid cutting. This part Uzine knew. The legend had grown a little and said that Hiro had died duel-wielding plasmoid cutters in a fit of manic work to fulfill a company order while listening to classical music. Yet, if Uzine had been told that Hiro had been visited by a company “representative” who had slit his throat while he slept, the resulting psychological shock could not have been less if Uzine had accidentally cut his left arm off with a plasmoid cutter. To cut off one's fingers or limbs with a plasmoid cutter accidentally when one was a plasmoid cutter was seen as the ultimate disgrace.

Uzine's eyes caught the text flashing below Hiro. Work Hard. Life is work. Work not for yourself. Keep up the good work. Under the watchful eye of Hiro, thousands like Uzine labored. Since they had no human rights, it was difficult to tell they were human. Many chimeras would continue to perform their craft well into old age--if they were fortunate enough to make it that long. Longevity was something the programmers seldom troubled themselves with. If a chimera happened to live longer, that was excellent so long as he could work. If he could not, the tattoo would turn a little redder. When the redness of the tattoo went from the top of the head to the big toe on his left side, he would die. In case the exhortations of Hiro were not enough, the blue tattoo usually was.

Uzine bent back over his plasmoid cutter and began to make the precision cuts he knew all too well. He did not know it yet, but his flinch at Hiro's image was the beginning of an earthquake.