Jack

[Aardvark]

"My name is Jack."

 

Those four syllables reverberated around my cerebellum like the sound of a gong in a long hallway. I'd heard them before, spoken by your average technogeeks and the other lifeless inhabitants of the GlobalNet, but never before had the words rung so true. This individual before me, floating disembodied before me was, as he, she, it, I'd never truly know, had said, was Jack.

 

Jack was a myth, a legend, a story from the beginning. A story so old, few believed it's validity. And of the few who did, most were the lifeless technogeeks who inhabited the GlobalWeb, the world wide neural network which linked every machine, every mind, every soul on the planet into one magnificent unreality shaped only by the power of the human brain running on the loosest set of guidelines possible. Every planet had one, but I was one of the fortunate few to reside on Earth, the mother planet, where the prototype, the millennia old Internet, made up the foundations for the GlobalWeb. Other planets' 'Webs ran on strict guidelines, secured and regulated by trans-system corporations, but Earth's was as it always had been. Anarchy.

 

Jack was born a mere handful of decades after the Internet's conception. The unwanted byproduct of the Cerebrus Digitalus Project, the first major attempt at transferring a human consciousness to a machine. The volunteers for this project became collectively known as Jack, for reasons lost in the bits of time. According to history, being the first exposed to the raw digital world blasted the minds of the first, turning the humans they once were into vegetables. According to legend, one taste of digital immortality was more than enough for all but a few to leave their fleshy prisons behind and live forever, jumping from machine to machine. How they perceived the digital world before proper cerebral translation software had been created was beyond the scope and imagination of all at the time and possibly even now, if the project hadn't been buried after the first "Failure".

 

Legally, the corporation responsible had nothing to fear, but the PR from the project once it got out was a nightmare. How it got out was never determined, but Cerebrus Digitalus was common knowledge before the scientists responsible even had a night to think about what had just happened. The official position of the company was that all but three volunteers had lost their lives, due to unforeseen consequences of mind/machine integration. The survivors of the project underwent psychiatric care, but had become so withdrawn by their experiences, all three committed suicide in care. Jack, as it would later be called, was flatly denied, despite various sources claiming that the consciousnesses of the volunteers lived on.

 

Mind/Machine integration was scaled back several notches and it would be another decade before the NeuralWeb, the next stepping stone toward the GlobalWeb, would come into existence. But the minds of the first were all on the internet, combined into one intelligent entity. It was unfathomable how Jack had survived, but it had, surviving everything from global digital warfare to corporate viruses, system upgrades to total revolutions in computing technology. Jack was there the whole time, keeping it's cerebellum down. As the years went by, people forgot about it. Indeed, those few who searched drew complete blanks, as most references to Jack had been erased and the rest discredited. But it's existence and path through human history could be traced. A mysterious breakthrough here, a military stronghold going silent there, Jack was out there, this God born from human and computer.

 

And here I was, a thousand years beyond, face to face with a myth. A ghost story, told to keep children in line while teaching them responsible use of the GlobalWeb. There was no doubt in my mind that this was Jack; indeed the lack of doubt itself was yet more proof to it's first, and only, statement to me. In Jack's domain, even the deepest, most remarkable human was nothing but ones and zeros. There were safeguards against it, but those few who believed in Jack also believed that the safeguards were nothing to an entity that could be anywhere on the GlobalWeb, passing through firewalls and cyberguardians as if they weren't there.

 

More proof for me to deal with. The revised history lesson hadn't come from my mind. As soon as it spoke, I knew the story of Jack. I knew about it's entire existence without flesh, without even the filters put in place to protect the raw human mind from the ravages of cyberspace. And with this sudden wealth of information, one thought floated in my mind. A thought picked up and dragged along, with me tailing behind it. Bouncing from node to node across the whole GlobalNet, my thought rang out. Home terminals and government mainframes alike relayed the thought to their users.

 

"Would you ever return to flesh?"

 

And as suddenly as I'd encountered it, I was back in my own body, disconnected from the GlobalWeb. Terminal Error XX3974073-0 returned - Mental Wetware Error.

My safeguards had pulled me from the web before the experience damaged my fragile mind.

 

I clicked a button on the console, bringing up the VDU. Photons trapped in a field of energy, giving me a visual display of the Web. A sound-proofed window into another world. Sometimes it felt good to go back to this. Feel the blood course through my fingers as they tapped out directions and input, instead of my subconscious. One of my regular haunts came up. A site designed exactly like an old bulletin board

 

I clicked new post.

 

Then my hands took over. They typed Jack. They tabbed down several times. They told the story I had just learnt. Then they triggered Immersion.

 

Before I knew it, I was back, inside the GlobalWeb. Jack was there. Although it had no physical features, it's avatar representing a shapeless blob more than anything else, I could tell it was grinning at me. Then, as suddenly as it had shown itself, it was gone.