Everything Is Connected

[Riley Mackenzie]

Not knowing how to answer that, it wasn't until they entered '29 and began a casual cruise towards Baffin that Riley broke his silence. "Your original source code comes from Shamus...the base cognitive infrastructure, FNORDNet Kernel, that kind of thing..."

He went on. "I started tinkering with you about three years ago. All you were at that time was nothing more than a digital backup suite, in case Shamus ever had another catastrophic failure."

"Another catastrophic failure?" Daeva asked.

"Aye, way back before your time, not too long after Shamus took full leadership of a Gaian militant group based out of Islay, the way Banger told it to me after the fact, Shamus was down at one of the bars telling an old war story to a gathering crowd, and without any warning whatsoever, dropped stone dead in mid-sentence...Banger finally got in touch with me a few days later to break the news, and after I told him that Malaclypse of the TAZ also inexplicably died a few days ago around the same time, we concluded the two death events must've occurred simultaneously."

"Wait." interrupted Daeva before Riley could continue. "What does one have to do with the other?"

"Good question!" he says to her, reminded that she only just met Shames for the first time earlier today.

"When I was looking for an excuse to leave the Gaians, I was invited to join a man named Malaclypse and his Discordian followers who eventually called themselves 'Temporary Autonomous Zoners'...at that time, the TAZ and the Edinburgh Gaians were pretty close, and a fair bit of cross-pollinating was going on. Among others, I left to become a Discordian Pope, and with the blessing of Mal, Shamus moved to the 'burrah and joined your uncle Dimi into the ranks of a cell he was leading, called 'Nature's Last Hope.'

"Remember that titanium sphere I showed you earlier? With the glowing crystal stuck to it?" He asked her needlessly, knowing that she literally remembers everything.

"Well, it's called a Fractal Neurolinquistic Obfuscation & Randomization Device- Mark XXIII Transponder, otherwise known as an F-Unit. It's broken, I don't know how to fix it, but, to answer your question, that's where you come from."

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