Unity © by Alan Grimes 1998
All Rights Reserved
Webpage by Jilli / Fate
UNITY
BY: Alan the Grimes
PAGE 1 of 3:
A story and a cool game design
The state of affairs cannot continue. A house divided must come together or fall. Therefore singularity must be attained even if it means the utter obliteration of the other part.
Setting: Vast computer controlled colony sitting on the edge of the rational universe.
You shall fight,
And you shall feed the fires,
And you shall Serve the rest,
And I Shall rule you all!
Prelude
Fighter unit 32 patrolled the halls. The halls were endless and without end. The halls were without order and wanting no chaos. There was no map or guide. All that there was for Fu32 to do was patrol and scan for intruders or units outside their designated areas. It had nobody to report to except the computer. The computer controls all! Scan Patrol Scan Patrol...
Fu32 was one of the elite, It had from birth been of the highest quality both mentally and physically. It had been enhanced with the best cybernetics ever designed. It was insect like with four legs and two hook like claws that it could use to attack any enemy that might appear. Its body was optimized for maximum fighting efficiency. Fighting was something that it had always been meant for but never realized. If it had emotions or desires it would have long since quit its scanning and patrolling and sought something interesting or exciting to do. But as it was it was blind to anything better. so it scanned and patrolled and scanned and patrolled and scanned and patrolled...
Engineer unit 96 with the help of his colleges built and rebuilt the city. Nobody knew what the city was supposed to look like in the end but the EUs built and rebuilt. The city could easily house a million people. Comfortably was another question. Eu96 built, destroyed and moved and repaired. It couldn't make any logical sense of its orders and because it had no emotions or feelings it had no desire for anything at all. Eu's are humanoid and have a cybernetic utility arm that they use to control and manipulate the machines. They have good strong bodies but are not gender differentiated at all.
The computer had yet to figure out the basics of good architecture. Though all the compartments were livable some were not as comfortable as others. For example the computer was likely to put a residence in a grid then surround it with eight parks. Then it would destroy one of the parks and add a pleasure module. Then it would destroy the next park over and create a security headquarters. Then It might just destroy another park and add a corridor. So somebody trying to get to the security module would have to walk through the residence, disturb whoever was using the pleasure module just to get to work. The entire place looked like this. The city extended for miles on dozens of levels. To add to the confusion the levels were not all level. Some dipped some went up while others went to the left. They were connected to each other at random intervals.
Servant unit 21 stood in its niche waiting for something to do. It had nobody to serve. It waited and waited. It would eagerly jump at the chance to do *anything* but as it was all it did was stand and wait. It had no thoughts of its own or it would have found something to do by now. The server units were simple humanoids with no external cybernetics. They were to be used as custodians, teachers, pleasure units, and various other menial tasks. The pleasure units had no gender but they could mutate themselves into almost anything their clients desired.
Only one of these servant units was in use Su39, It was teaching a class of five "misfits". These were meant to be other units but something had gone wrong during their construction that made them unusable. The computer simply assigned this server unit to take care of them and had nothing further to do with the issue. The computer wouldn't have cared if the unit had been a custodian unit who would have disintegrated the lot of them but as fortune had it a teacher unit was assigned. She was set on preschool mode. So she dressed the students in diapers (except for the one with the wall crawler legs) and taught preschool. She didn't care at all that she had been teaching the same semester's worth of lessons for the last three hundred years. (the youngest was seventy years old). She is a completely subjective statement. The teacher used a feminine voice but there was nothing outstandingly feminine about her.
The five of them, two who we shall call A and B, were intended to be fighter units one of them had the wall crawler legs but humanoid arms. The other had the claw arms but humanoid legs. There was a engineer unit there was nothing wrong with him physically but something had gone wrong when his mind was being programed. He was completely lacking all knowledge and vocabulary. He later learned through imitating the other students who were fully educated already but deformed. There were two servant units, one (D) was normal but for some reason she had been given a gender, both! She was hermaphroditic. This really didn't bother her much but it bothered the computer so she was sent in with the misfits. The second (E) was a much more interesting case she wasn't really a she there was nothing feminine about her but her arms were blob-like from the elbow down but she still had clumsy thumbs to work with. She didn't have all the intelligence that the others had (Her IQ was only about 50 where the others had an IQ of about 200) but what made her really different and perhaps dangerous was that she had emotions, if she had been given a gender she would have experienced sexuality too.
The Computer sat alone. It had nodes all over the place but only a few were actually configured, connected, and activated. It probably would receive a great intelligence boost if they had. It was simply attempting to follow the directives of the people who had sent it on this mission of colonization.
It wasn't the most reliable of machines but it had just enough error correction software to keep it running.
Because the nodes weren't connected it could only make guesses about what it was building looked like. If only it had feedback. It's product was like that of a blind carpenter.
Failure was inevitable.
In the vacant control room of the colony command center the computer's screens glowed. The screen savers had been active for hundreds of years. The one on console twelve had been on for considerably less time than the other ones. If you were to touch the touchpad you would read a virtual history of the failures of the machine. It read like this.
FAILURE INCIDENT DETECTED. MODULE 3AX412.
RUNNING PROCESSES REDIRECTED TO MODULE 230, 423.
REPAIR UNIT DISPATCHED.
REPAIR UNIT REPORTS CONDITION MODULE 3AX412 NOMINAL.
MODULE 3AX412 RESTARTED.
The system in effect recovered to full capacity without any human intervention. The machine continued to experience failures like this. As is inevitable with aging hardware the failure rate increased as the life expectancy for each piece of hardware was passed.
Suddenly all the screen savers went dark. Console twelve reverted to text mode command.
CRITICAL FAILURE IN MODULE SUBKERNEL DETECTED.
SUSPENDING ALL RUNNING PROCESSES.
AUXILIARY KERNEL IS ACTIVE.
EMERGENCY PROTOCOLS INITIATED.
ALL SYSTEMS SET TO STANDBY.
FIGHTER UNITS DEPLOYED.
REPAIR UNITS DEPLOYED.
SYSTEM SETS COMMAND MODE ENABLED.
The auxiliary kernel is not the main system. It is only a little program that runs a few scripts, sets everything to standby and waits for console input to tell it that everything has been fixed and that it is okay to restart the system. The procedure is so easy that even a human could do it! Since no humans are available it is now up to our Cybernetic Units to save the day.
The commands to the units were issued as follows. The Fighter Units, eight of forty of them, were ordered to protect the computer core and the critical areas from further sabotage. The Engineer Units 10 of 100 of them were ordered to repair the computer. The Servant units, the 60 primaries at least and some of the secondaries, were ordered to switch to standalone mode and await further instructions. There were thousands of secondaries who were for one reason or another out of communication with the computer. They just stood in their niches and waited.
Responding to the order the fighters and the engineers moved into action. Because the city was so large and all the computer maps were unavailable nobody was really sure where the control center was. Now it is a race between the fighters and the engineers. If the engineers arrived first they would simply fix the computer and things would return to the way they were. If the fighters arrived first they would defend the imaginary controllers against all intrusion.
The fighter units joined together in squads as they found each other and then split up again into efficient search patrols. They then raced through the halls at dizzying speeds searching for the control room.
The engineers marched in a single file line. They moved at a simple determined pace. They were in no hurry they simply walked. In their centuries of building they had learned a fair amount about the layout of the place and moved with confidence in the general direction of the control room.
After two hours the fighters arrived first.
The engineers arrived three minutes too late. They approached the fighter units. The fighters turned them away. "No admittance!" Each engineer tried in turn to enter. They presented the correct access codes but since the fighters couldn't verify them through the computer. All ten of them were rejected in turn. They fell back to regroup. They stood a short distance down the hall, within earshot of the fighter units. If they had emotions they would have been panicked. They understood the gravity of the situation but didn't know what to do. They knew they needed to fix the/a computer but couldn't get to it. Perhaps they could finish their job by fixing all the other computers. They decided on that as their best course of action.
They began working on the module they were standing in. They discovered that the module's computers were useless because they were connected to nothing. They saw that they could help it by connecting it to the adjacent modules. They began their work. It would take months to connect everything. They saw what they were doing as an adequate substitute for fixing the main computer.
It was not.
The good news is that the auxiliary servant units will now be able to talk to each other. The bad news is that none of the 200 primary units who are linked directly to the computer will not be affected by any of these changes.
Meanwhilest in then Nursery on day 28,952.
Student C liked sitting next to Student E because Student E was stimulating company. Since awaking without an intellect the teacher had taught him to read. Since then he has read *everything* in the abridged but comprehensive library *twice*. Now he knew more than anybody else in the class and a bit more than the teacher herself. The teacher didn't have a gender but she was programed to present herself as female. Unit C excelled in all subjects except art, which it couldn't understand at all, and history which it could say it knew but couldn't fathom all the emotional forces that drove history.
The word 'liked' is a subjective term that Student C was not capable of. Let me try to condense the fifteen years of intense thought that had led unit C to that conclusion. All of them were the same he concluded. They all were incomplete. The teacher had the same problem but she was artificially made complete by this program that was using her brain and body. Student E was different. She was handicapped too but in a radically different way. That way was quite simple: She felt; She had feelings. It took her only half a second to find his cybernetics revolting while it took him days to discover she was different, weeks to discover that she could be a source of stimulation for him, and *years* to discover that it would be beneficial to him to be stimulated by her and therefore beneficial to him to pursue a relationship.
Student C sat next to Student E. He had to try to get her to pay attention to the overly simplified versions of the concepts he was thinking about. She couldn't comprehend any complex sentences. She could only think in terms of noun verb noun or sometimes noun being-verb adjective. He was using her. He would try to show her a concept and then used her response to it to determine what his response should be. She used him to draw her pictures for her. His one good hand was more agile than her two mittens for sculpting and his mental faculties for visualization could rival any artist who ever lived. All she needed to do was be his inspiration and driving force. Some time later he discovered that he could use his cybernetic arm as a paint sprayer. He could draw a page at 500 dpi color in five minutes with the tool that was intended for drawing logos and the like.
Suddenly the teacher stopped in the middle of her lesson and started acting like the automation that she was. "Switching to autonomous mode." then she switched back into her teacher voice but with a different tone. "Students we have a problem the central computer has gone down and I cannot continue the lesson. You will wait here until your parents arrive to pick you up."
Student C prompted student E, careful again to translate so Student E's weak but gifted mind could understand. "That was a recording." Student E shrugged. She was already thinking about exploring the tunnels.
Student E got up and started to wander around the room again. There were several odd doors around the classroom leading all over the place. If you looked through the narrow windows of them you could usually see some type of passage way leading off from them. They were all bolted shut with large shiny stainless steel bolts. E gestured at one of the few doors she hadn't yet taken the class on a field trip through turned to C, "C, open." If C had emotions it wold have rolled its eyes in exasperation. It didn't It simply went over to the door and racheted the bolts off then used its robotic arm to unlock the panel and lift it off. It weighed about fifty pounds. The cyborg handled the weight easily and set the hatch down on the wall next to it. Student C just stood there calmly awaiting further instructions.
Student E looked in, There was a steep and narrow flight of stairs leading up to some other compartment. E left the classroom. This triggered the teacher's automatic 'wandering student' response. The teacher went to the door "Come back this instant!" Student E ignored the teacher. The teacher climbed the stairs in pursuit. The other students having long since been conditioned to follow the teacher simply followed the teacher into the passage. The passage was fairly tight for people of their size. All of them were six feet tall and of a heavy muscular build.
The field trip had begun!
The passage reached a junction Several other passages, some from the room they just left, met together here. Student E selected a new fork and took it. It was carpeted and the walls were a bit wider, there were brass railings. The teacher caught up with her. "If you don't stop this instant I'll call security!" E shook it off. The teacher hadn't yet reached the point where she actually called the fighter units. The hall ended at a large ritzy bar and restaurant. It was noisy there. One of the adjoining rooms was undoubtably an equipment room. E looked around. She had seen a couple of these before, this one was simply another cookie from the same mold. She opened an elegant doorway just to see what was on the other side. It was a large industrial laundry. The teacher began to pretend to call security "Securitee! Securitee!" E was beginning to get nervous because it was always only shortly after this that several fighter units showed up to take them back to the classroom. She continued anyway. It was best to see as much as possible before she was taken back.
The next room was of a design she hadn't seen before. It was large and empty. There was a computer, some lockers, a servant unit and a large thick and soft silk covered pillow-mattress in the middle of the room. The teacher spoke this time in the male voice that it used for errors "Unable to contact computer." It looked around in virtual panic. It couldn't *feel* panicked but it sensed that its situation called for creative action. It turned around and closed the door. "We will stay here until security arrives. You are really in for it now!" Again that was a preprogramed action modified only slightly to fit the circumstances. It was intended to keep a human child off guard long enough for the unit to contact security. Student E didn't want to go back to that horrible classroom *ever* It was too boring even for her limited intelligence.
E walked over to the Servant Unit for this pleasure chamber. "Hello?" E was happy to see a new face even if it was identical to the ones she had already seen. The pleasure unit opened its eyes. "How may I serve you."
"Get us out of here!" Student E demanded.
"This unit is not permitted to leave this module. The exit is on your right." She gestured towards the exit that the teacher was guarding.
Student E wasn't about to give up yet. She turned to C and told him "Make her come!" C recognized the room as a pleasure room. He knew a fair amount about it such as the fact that the pleasure unit was controlled by the computer console. He went to the console and plugged his cybernetic arm into it. He was unable to bypass the user menus the system was a closed system. Its modules used a form of object oriented design. He was however able to reach a hidden menu. All the direct controls were marked down as private. The first menu selected the personality traits of the unit. It had the following options: Intelligence, Sexuality, and Personality. He lacked the capacity to choose. He turned to Student E "Choose."
E looked at her mitten arms and the touch screen. "Can you touch them?" Student C understood that she meant "To select" but wasn't able to think that abstractly. "Yes" he answered. She looked at the options he had taught her what they meant. "All, I think." She wasn't too sure. He did as she asked and returned to the main menu. He realized just then that it would be most beneficial to him to find the panel that controlled him. He didn't see any immediate usefulness in having sexuality but if he could become like Student E he would be self sufficient and independent. He didn't really want it, he only understood it as something that would fit the definition of beneficial in the context of himself.
Student E looked at the pleasure unit. There was no change. "Come with us." She pleaded.
"This unit is not permitted to leave this module."
The main menu was a select your fantasy list. There were two main options: 'Standard sexual intercourse' and 'other'. "Choose." C commanded E. Sexual intercourse led to two other menus, a menu to alter the body, and a menu to select clothing. The body could undergo almost any alteration, except growing fur or departures from the humanoid form. There were several restrictions on maximum leg length, breast size and the like. The face had a fixed range of flexibility but everything else was up for change. Student E selected 'other'.
Another menu came up. This was the fetish menu. There were choices like sadism, masochism, bondage, super large tits, multiple tits, merge, weight gain, etc. Student E was dazzled by the array of choices. "What is merge?" She could vaguely remember Student C trying to teach her the word once but didn't remember. "It means to join or fuse. I think the selection means to melt your body into the pleasure unit." C explained. E thought about it. If the pleasure unit couldn't leave and she became part of the pleasure unit then she wouldn't have to leave! The logic was so simple even she could figure it out. She made her choice. "Merge"
Without concern for the implications of the choice Student C entered the command. The program was loaded and transferred into the pleasure unit. For the first time in its life it stepped out of its niche. "Please note that this fantasy requires at least one month."
Student E was sad "Only one month!"
"You are permitted to spend up to a year in this fantasy."
"I want to stay for-ever!" Student E protested. The pleasure unit took no notice. "Do you have special permission?"
"YES!"
The pleasure unit noted the request. She forwarded the request to the Central Computer. The pleasure unit would assume a positive response until it heard otherwise. "Which of you will be engaged in this fantasy?"
"All of us!" Student E responded. She liked everybody even the ones she thought were gros. The other students took it all in as they would any other input. The teacher showed no response. The pleasure unit simply loaded the appropriate routine. It had routines for handling up to a hundred people.
"Please remove your clothing and place it in the lockers." All the students complied as best they could given their unique handicaps. E was most surprised to see that D had a thing between it's legs. Even in the dorm where they slept E had never seen any of the others naked. Since D had normal arms and legs it helped the others who didn't. Then it was the teacher's turn to get undressed. It refused. "May I remind you that clothes are to be worn at all times!"
E had learned some magic words that could be used to control the others she hadn't dared try them on the teacher until now. "Override!"
The teacher twitched and began removing its clothes. C had an idea. He had put two and two together and came up with this. "Cancel running program." The teacher looked up from what she was doing "Authorization required." If C had emotions he would have been beaming. As it was he took in the simple data that the teacher was simply running a program like the pleasure unit. If the other students noticed the exchange they didn't show it. With all the clothes in the lockers the Students lined up along the wall.
The teacher unit had run out of program and was behaving like the students.
The pleasure unit moved on to the next instruction in its program. "You will now step into the chamber for decontamination." The teacher happened to be first in line. It entered the chamber. Moments later it stepped out The only noticeable difference was the absence of her long mane of silver hair. The next in was Student B. It went in with lobster like arms and came out being nearly identical to a human save for the lack of a bellybutton and the absence of genitalia. It simply noted the change and went back to its place in line.
Student D was next It went in a hermaphrodite and came out a hairless hermaphrodite. Student C came out without his cybernetic arm. If he had emotions he would have mourned the loss because it was a useful tool even if it was unsightly. Student A took longer than the others. Student E was getting worried. When it came out it had normal legs. It experimentally bent and flexed them and then took its first steps on them. It moved with surprising if only mechanical grace as it came out.
It was E's turn. She was nervous would she finally get hands? What would it feel like to have her hair cut? It had grown so long that it reached her butt. She stood in the niche formerly belonging to the pleasure unit. The doors closed. It was now a cylinder. It began filling up with a metallic liquid. She couldn't feel anything. Moments passed she was getting scared. Quickly the metal began to drain out of the tube. It felt as though a layer of skin had been removed.
When she stepped out of the tube she was sad, her mittens were just as the had been. She was so sad that she almost forgot what she was doing. She saw the others lined up and quickly got in line.
The pleasure unit preceded to the next instruction "Follow me." It turned and led them up onto the large pillow-bed. The pleasure unit sat Indian fashion towards one end of the bed. Its legs melted together and it was left with a shelf of flesh. Directing with its arms It instructed them "Now sit down three on each side. They sat down facing each other. Their legs intertwined. Now hold hands with the person two people down. The pleasure unit reached behind the backs of the first two people and joined hands with the next two people. "Now lean forward heads down." The pleasure unit kept her head up.
The teacher's hand-holding exercise kicked in. She started to ask around whether anybody wanted to join her in song. She was refused. She looked rather uncertain as to what to do next.
