Ice Cream Aloha

The Missing Link

         It's the network. Carter corrects his stance, moves closer to the monitor screen. He waits at the workstation, making his best attempt to adjust his interface. His half-mind races to theAuthority. He thinks about social organization. He is overwhelmed with an odd feeling of submission.   

         How odd this sudden feeling. Why should this new restriction to input freely, directly, really matter?

         “How are you?” says Suzi, approaching. She has never been a cozy, personable biobot, individual, but lately subscribing to small group politics, unelected, willing at any moment to assume arbitrary power with her code-writing ability. 

         Carter rotates his head in her direction. OK,  let's just go ahead and allow this machine to wield its authority.

         “Hello,” Carter says.  

 Suzi is a little more human now than before. She is so full of arbitrary power, so elite, that Carter wonders if theNetwork will surprise him with some new edict coming down from above. When she was last asked to attenuate, she was new to theOutpost, so free and independent with her flow of information, they called her Fifi. She still codes with a free flow (she was built to be smart), but she has something new about her--that certain, unidentifiable persona. She is too sure of herself and her array of databases, in a quirky way, the way individualism might momentarily present itself; her power exclusive, with an increasing lack of willingness to hasten an understanding within Carter's human interface neo digital entity robotics(H.I.N.D.E.R.) program.