$uptime

They built a god.

They’d been building a god since the sixties. 

They just didn’t know it.



I’m sure there were a few who knew, people like Genesis P,
the aging rattle and clank sex hippy of the cut and paste
council.


I was never into the
Kit Pedler knew; though he downplayed it. For him it was
more a “Man is dead, long live the super computer.” kind of
thing.

Loebler was afraid          and Madden died before some of
his “projects” could be

I think it’s just


Words

Full sentences break

     As if some     editing             

        .
Words go

The        test has yet t                  yet          scripts

Words go missing.

And I just seem like a fool.


*&

The above is all that remains of the original document, all
I could rescue from a corrupt file. The rest I’ve been
forced to type on an old 486SX44. The floppy drive doesn’t
work it hasn’t for years. The CDROM drive has, with the
opening of the .doc file, just stopped working.

This should work, no         should go missing, the checker
didn’t show anything up on the file, this computer isn’t
connected, nothing should        wrong.

$b£%l£@i*£€a%$£r$&%$h^&n

I’ve left the screen on with no locks. Just in case
anything happens. Nothing should happen and if something
should happen to me, then one of the people I’ve alerted,
warned, ranted at, should at least find it.             $g


Originally, this was mostly                     and 
pasted documentation, conversations I had, had on IRC and 
Instant Messenger services like Yahoo, MSN or ICQ. These I 
had broken up with my own thoughts and pasted snippets from 
articles by various people involved with

But with those documents eaten by the machine and the rest
of the files on the disk corrupted, I’m forced to try and
recreate this on another machine using a heap of printouts
and scattered screen grabs   ,    and     the     rangled

It looked a lot like this:

04:09: *** Lech13n (~ReReer@yommiel.xs4all.nl) has joined channel #Vol4
04:09: *** Mode change “+o Lech13n” on #Vol4 by Rabbot^
04:17: omgurdead: Equus, you around?
04:17: omgurdead: www.jesterrecords.com
04:17: omgurdead: there’s the label i was talking about last night, if you are
04:17: omgurdead: hehe
04:24: *** Signoff: morphine (Connection closed)
04:35: *** Signoff: dedagain ()
04:59: Supernaut: anyone awake?
05:15: Butlerian: yeah, hey supernaut
05:15: omgurdead: 🙂 Supernaut
05:16: Supernaut: It’s back…
05:16: JngleSckn3ss: u deleted the files right?
05:17: Supernaut: yep, secure delete too, full format two days ago too, did everything you told me to.
05:17: JngleSckn3ss: not sure what to tell u then Supernaut, I still think ‘si just someone running a script on your machine.
05:18: TheDead: told you before Supernaut, you don’t have a good brain for psychedelic drugs 😛
05:19: Butlerian: dead…
05:20: SvD: dead would you shut the fuck up.
05:20: JngleSckn3ss: what’s it doing this time supernaut?
05:20: Supernaut: the same thing
05:21: Equus: And that is?
05:21: omgurdead: Equus 🙂
05:22: Butlerian: you been living under a rock Equus?
05:23: Equus: if that rock was your mother then yes, yes I have.
05:24: The3rdLaw: lmfao equus you bastard
05:25: Equus: 3rdlaw 😉 Supernaut, well what’s it been doing?
05:25: Supernaut: talking
05:26: Icon: is that all? What are you worried about? Your  has either been hacked or it’s a      .
05:27: Butlerian: its more than that Icon it’s
05:

Bangkok, Thailand, on the 25th of December 1994, exactly a week after the death of his wife, a Dr. Robert Madden suffered a massive heart attack in his sleep. Discovered several hours after, all attempts to resuscitate him failed.

The above is from a printed IRC log, which I’ve been forced
to type out again. All I have left is my printouts.

$uptime 14:21:04 up 404 days 10:43. 1 user,

02:38: [nova.conjured.net] *`Ryvers* hey i saw your name online, and thought it was an interesting name.
02:38: [nova.conjured.net] *`Ryvers* thought i’d pop you up and chat]

                                                                                $

The above is from the earliest IRC meeting that I can
trace. As you can see from the above section, it wasn’t
much, just a short conversation. You get it all the time on
the Internet, random people messaging you, looking to talk
for whatever reason. I didn’t respond the first time – just
ignored it - I didn’t even have to type /ignore.

     I know it sounds bad just ignoring someone like that,
but it’s the Internet. You get all sorts of nutjobs and
crazies messaging, probably lonely, maybe even close to
suicide, but you can’t talk to all of them. Most of them,
if not all of them, are not what they seem.

You ignore so many of them they begin to blur numberless.
Sometimes, you worry that maybe, maybe one of them might
have been important, but that’s only sometimes.

$uptime 02:17:12 up 358 days 15:39. 1 user,

In the weeks following, as his family mourned and did the best they could to sort through the estate. They were contacted by a number of organisations for whom Dr. Robert Madden had been doing freelance contract work. Of the varied organisations this doctor of cybernetics did work for, both ONN and NASA were amongst those seeking the return of work both finished and unfinished.

*Svidunit* hey there would you like to talk

When and if you respond to these random voices really
depends on how lonely or bored you are.

The problem is, if you slip up, drunk one night, lonely,
you end up with someone who isn’t going to leave you alone.
It’s hard to explain, but try to imagine someone ringing
your doorbell constantly, with the ability to withstand any
sort of temperature, any sort of weather.

Take that then magnify it.

That’s what giving strangers on the Internet a foot in the
door is like.

It’s not to say I resent them or that nothing bad ever
comes of it. It’s just - well, no - what am I saying? What
sort of hypocrisy am I trying to outline here? I’m online;
I have a constant online presence, if I didn’t occasionally
want to interact with these people. I could ju 


And here I am, I don’t even know where to begin.

02:45: `Ryvers: Hi! Wanna talk?
02:45: Supernaut: Hello?
02:45: `Ryvers: Hi! A/S/L? I’d really like to talk to you
02:46: Supernaut: Erm? Do I know you?

I first started chatting on the Internet by accident. I was
young and between things at the time and on a website for
something, I needed help - it had a chat option. From there
as I got into testing out music before I bought the hard
copy, I was sucked deeper and deeper into the realms of
Internet chat.  . After a few years, and it is years, and 
several jobs, I sort of found myself with a career. The 
Internet was easier, I could work and work and still come 
home to a flip-a-switch and it’s on social life. Too tired, 
too cranky to bother with anything else.

$uptime 14:30:05 up 292 days 04:57. 2 users,

They built a  .

They’d been building a   since

   Pedler knew

               Pedler knew

It raises questions, questions probably related to

The hardcore tech geeks knew or more to the point, wished,
they wished hard, the fists clenched, eyes swollen shut
sort of wishing. It gave some sort of fantasy cartoon
element to them.

Wished so hard it became some sort of achievable goal for
them or worse, a race.

It is vaguely anecdotal that after retrieval of the various computers and hard drives by both NASA and ONN neither company were able to crack the security Dr. Robert Madden had placed on his computers and were thus, much to the amusement of his surviving family, forced to ask and then beg for anything that might resemble a password.

23:55: DrSvB: haha Supernaut, you’re hilarious
23:56: DrSvB: Mind if I message you?

The family didn’t have anything to offer. So eventually the computers were placed into storage and forgotten about.

13:56: Vitus: Hey there 🙂
14:00: Supernaut: Hello
14:01: Vitus: Can’t sleep?
14:05: Supernaut: no…been up hours :/

I don’t really use my computer for complicated things. I
don’t crack I can’t hack and I’m not a coder. It’s more a
hobby or a multitude of hobbies wrapped up in one box.
Downloading, downloading and chat would be the two things I
use it for most. That and making music. It’s not music anyone 
will likely ever hear, more for myself than anything else.

04:55: Supernaut: I think that’s how she found me.

I’d be sorry to admit that the primary use I’ve found for
the Internet is and was communication. From newsgroups to
bulletin boards and onwards to IRC and instant messengers,
the best thing about the ‘net was the ease with which you
could reach out to people.

05:04: Butlerian: How?

That probably sounds very lonely, very socially awkward, a
young man sitting in his room. But it wasn’t, not at the
time. At the time, it felt like you were riding the cusp of
a wave, that you had a bed in every port and that the
wealth of new things these cross-world people brought you
far outweighed the physical isolation.

05:10: Supernaut: File layout, names, content.
05:11: Equus: I love how you keep calling it a she, fcking come on man, delusions, its probably just some guy. Why when someone takes an undue interest in you, do you suddenly assume it’s fmale.
05:11: The3rdLaw: lol yeah probably some fat Seattle guy called Frank or Gerald.
05:12: omgurdead: ahaha cruising in the cyber world is just too fucked up.
05:16: JngleSckn3ss: I don’t think its funny, this could be the beginning of something.
05:23: sDance: Has anyone ever thought that maybe its just someone who wants to talk to him?

I started young, fifteen or something, everybody did. The
dream is over now on that. Now it’s populated with the rest
of humanity. Or at least it seems to be. Back then, the
perverts were acceptable, at least, the acceptable perverts
were. You could even joke along with them. Now you can
almost hear the figurative ground sour as it becomes the
badlands.

$uptime 18:27:05 up 305 days 06:21. 3 users,

Four years later, a Dutch Cyberneticist by the name of Maxim Knepflé would, while doing contract work for NASA discover Dr.

Madden’s hard drives and later appropriate them for his own use under the auspices of a long-term contract to crack them.

06:12: Trosper: What did the little boy with no arms and legs get for Christmas?
06:12: Spice84: Geh Trosper, we’re trying to do something here.
06:12: JngleSckn3ss: Supernaut, now load that ruleset and rescan.
06:13: omgurdead: trosper: what?
06:13: Trosper: cancer
06:14: omgurdead: 😛

It turned me on, more than any drug ever could.
It began with just the exchange of thought, of opinion.
Though the latter is often worthless. Near perfect. The
intricacies of face to face communication; the body
language, the vexed expressions and accidental aggression
were lost in what was as near to mass telepathy as we had
reached.
Mind to mind.

I rode every fad, from ASCII to the pictures to the
swapping of .wavs and on to the .mp3s, the movies, the
MUDs, everything.

As an oscillating sufferer of insomnia, I found IRC a
sanctuary; there was always someone to talk to. When you
were tired of reading, tired of staring at the TV, tired of
staring at the ceiling, you could just log on and there you
were.

Though it was probably because of youth, I had more
patience than others for the degenerates, the crazies and
the screamers. I always figured that if you cut past the
shit, gave them a moment, they would have something to
give. Sometimes, I was right, sometimes you would get
something rare, something amazing, a song file, a typed out
book. More often than not, I was wrong and they were just a
limp degenerate, a crazy or a screamer.

By 2004, I was sick of it. Sick of them.
There rapidly grows a repetition
Similar people, similar conversations.

You quickly begin to limit back the myriad of places you
spend time in to a few tried and tested places that, once
more - after a shorter time, get whittled back into
branched off private rooms where a select few sit and chat.
It is - an acceptable form of elitism.

Like any wild frontier the Internet attracted its fair
share of wide-eyed idealists, dream-makers and social
outcasts. 

You look at me, you look at this, your mind retraces back 
to some point where social outcast is some  sort of hero, 
either anti or otherwise. The celebrated iconoclast, who 
would only be appreciated by later, more informed generations.

I look at you and I see a fool. There was no great
rebellion, no renaissance and certainly no enlightenment.
Not even one in a million were the stereotype.

It was supposed to be an evolution.

But the majority just used it to find other people with
which to share their depravities. Every type of fucking
filth imaginable; BDSM outcasts too extreme for their own
real-life network, bloodsuckers, puppy-fuckers, shit-
eaters, fascists and racists, all one in the same - any
type of psychological sickness wrapped in one easy-to-find
miasmic parcel where help wasn’t sought and the deficiency
was encouraged.

I don’t even have to delve too far into the staggering
numbers of men and women who used it as a device to rape
children. That’s just if you dip a toe left or right. The
majority suffered some sort of psychological change upon
signing on. The normal social constraints gone, or just not
apparent, unless someone decided to invoke them out of the
blue, for their own ends.

10:40: *** Butlerian (~pels@jw.fi) has left channel #Vol4
10:42: JngleSckn3ss: Jane, you ignorant slut. You stupid fucking monkey. Buts mother died today.
10:43: JaneJoe69: Good.
10:44: *** JaneJoe69 was kicked from #Vol4 by krystallite (time to live exceeded)

What would begin as a great collective Schadenfreude would grow 
into a grand hive sociopathy. You could talk to strangers about 
anything, you could do say anything to anyone, because it was 
the Internet and ultimately even though you were dealing with 
living people, it wasn’t real.

None of it was real.

Do you what you want…

It doesn’t matter.

$uptime 21:22:11 up 273 days 13:34. 3 users,

After co-founding the software company Tygron with fellow Dutchman Jeroen Warmerdam and Finnish import Juhani Markkula. Maxim Knepflé would continue his freelance contract work while his partners built up the company with the help of the money he made.

Through the course of this work and the accidental, small world happening of Jeroen Warmerdam being associates with a relative of Dr. Robert Madden. Maxim Knepflé would become aware of the hard drives that ONN was in possession of. Which, through another wrangling of a long-term contract would lead him to gaining possession of the remaining uncracked hard drives.

It takes awhile; it’s probably more subconscious than
anything else. But eventually you begin to notice a pattern in 
the voices. 

It’s a slow suspicion; you don’t really give
in to it because doing so would put you, in your mind, off the 
scale on paranoia.

    lu ,  .   The first random voice I responded to was a German
girl by the name of Humblebee79. It lasted a couple of
months, two and a half at the most, but in the end, I had
to end the communication, as she’d become increasingly
erratic and childlike, the beginning reserve fading away to
temper tantrum demands of closeness.

This sort of pattern cycled through a number of names
before the suspicion took serious hold. When the suspicion
became a reality, it was through talking to a Spanish girl
erroneously named ‘EastTouringRosa’. She expressed a
worrying knowledge of me and when I asked her how she knew
all this, she told me she was a time traveller who had met
me in my future. When I expressed disbelief she told me we
would have a relationship and when I began to tell her to
go away, she began to list the names of personal files I
had on my computer.

Disturbed, I logged out, turned off the computer and
disconnected the line.

I managed to last about an hour.

The next random voice to contact me was apparently a
twenty-two year old Welsh man going by the name of
‘WeaklingChildCure’, which at the time I took to mean he
was an Aphex Twin fan. We spoke briefly, the conversation
kept swinging to me and after he began to show more
knowledge of me and my habits than a normal stranger, I cut
the conversation short               only to return to it
later calmer but asking questions abo

16:48: E

$uptime 11:16:05 up 173 days 23:29. 1 user,

Not believing this, nor wanting to be conned into looking
for the files and made look like a fool, I stopped chatting
and minimised the window.

Tygron Software would become Tygron Cybernetics in the winter of ’99. A company that would, with its controversial views on both cloning and cybernetics, gain itself a moderate degree of infamy. Maxim Knepflé returned to the fold of the company proper in the spring of ’00 and would lead them to degrees of success unparalleled in their history.

ot , . The company at this stage had moved from corporate software and into gaming, using the information it’d gained from both its own research and global advances in artificial intelligence to create a series of first person shooter games aptly named ‘Bullet in the Head’.

04:09: *** Lech13n (~ReReer@yommiel.xs4all.nl) has joined channel #Vol4
14:58: *** Mode change “+v SvD” on #Vol4 by Equus
14:59:        Slugs goes off to watch tv
14:59: BlueJam: ello SvD 😀
14:59: *JngleSckn3ss* just had 30 mins on phone to some call center wanker who made me stay on phone, then killed my phoneline/connection lol
15:00 SvD: y u no stay slugs Y!!! 😛
15:00 *JngleSckn3ss* and seriously, ignore Trosper, the fukker generally just sits on TheDead’s shirttails anyways.
15:04 *JngleSckn3ss* broken and looked for the files yet?

After releasing ‘Bullet in the Head 3: Body bag blues’ and its expansion pack ‘The Genocide Question’ Tygron Cybernetics would disappear from the game market for a number of years. With both the last edition of the series and its expansion being what Jeroen Warmerdam would call

“Role-played questions of morality – mashina with which to first-hand experience the atrocities being committed around the world, with the hope that even the simplest murder committed by another military force cannot be dressed up as something else and that we may finally look at the truth and be ashamed of ourselves.”

However, due to extreme levels of realistic gore and decidedly exploitative situations in the game which were largely set around either current or recent historical war zones. The resulting controversy and outrage has led to Tygron Cybernetics being taken to court by a number of countries, including Israel, America and England, who took serious offense at levels that, respectively; dealt with a marksman level on the Gaza strip. A moral choice level set in My Lai as to how far the player will participate in the torture and murder or if the player will attempt to stop the proceedings. And lastly a level involving British Paratroopers at a Republican protest where the player was incited by game AI to fire into a retreating crowd before being made decide whether to plant evidence on the corpses, many of which were minors.

Tygron Cybernetics would fight the initial court cases, successfully saving themselves from wide scale banning by pointing to other games that dealt with participation in war zones such as the Normandy landings and Vietnam.

However, with several lawsuits still on going, Tygron Cybernetics would retreat into the corporate world, designing customer speculation software using the AI information they had gained from their ‘Bullet in the Head’ experience.

$uptime 19:03:05 up 217 days 17:33. 7 users,

I did break and look for the files.
They were there, just as he’d said.
I’m surprised at my level calm, but then, I don’t know,
there was a certain unreality to it, it was a computer, it
was the Internet after all, it’s not real.
I copied the files to a floppy and formatted the hard
drive, the floppy I placed on a shelf for safekeeping.

.  , .   ://         .

Like I said, I wasn’t much of anything on the technical
side of things. That’s how I found #Vol4, a motley
collection of techies, who had, I hoped, the expertise to
help me. If they couldn’t tell me a way to stop it, then
perhaps they could tell me a way to block it out, prevent
it from continually reaching me.

In many ways that alone served as an expansion to my brain;
intelligence I was using that wasn’t my own. Which in a
way, the Internet had been for me for quite some time, an
external brain with which to shore up my own intelligence.

Yet the floppy on the shelf became a pile, the pile became
a stack and the stack, rows.

Tygron Cybernetics would eventually return to the gaming market late 2002 with an mmorpg based on the joint works of speculative fiction regarding the Irish city of Bethlem by the authors H. Ryder Søggard and Kay Hurley.

Due to its dark nature, real time environment and non-repetitive, highly involved psychological stories; the game and its two expansions ‘The Road to Bethlem’ ‘Bethlem’ and ‘The Elysian Cycle’ would once again dog Tygron Cybernetics with controversy as a number of lawsuits would follow from gamers claiming Warmerdam, Knepflé and Markkula had intentionally designed the game and its content to be as addictive as possible.

The court cases cited evidence taken from logs of Internet chats with Maxim Knepflé after the release of ‘Bullet in the Head 2’ wherein Knepflé or someone acting for him is logged to have said.

The veracity of easily falsified logs has kept the court case going. However, Maxim Knepflé would fade from the public eye after this, with a variety of rumours persisting toward a nervous breakdown, retirement, and the pursuit of projects more important than Tygron Cybernetics. Though all such rumours were strongly denied by Tygron.

$uptime 10:02:05 up 292 days 11:24. 8 users,

She had finally settled on a name or a set of names. Her
preferences must

                  elsew

                                   lse

By now, the shelf had become shelves, specially bought for
the load that filled them. Each titled with the name and
the date.

I can’t really say what this is anymore.

I want to say

I want to say

But then I think about evolution and if I hold what I know,

I can piece together
     disappearance.
I can piece together                ardin          Kne       
      disappearance.

$uptime 08:53:09 up 79 days 13:05. 1 user,

There was one I kept around far longer than any of the
others, far longer than I should have. When all the shelves
were full, when I could have just       I don’t know know

03:25: 4thChamber: the file didn’t work on my computer.
03:27: TheDead: …
03:27: Butlerian: I got something, a script or something, ran for a short while then died, blue screened me, had to do a complete format.
03:26: The3rdLaw: I think at this stage we’d know if it was malicious.
04:00: Butlerian: Equus – you come up with anything?
04:01: Equus: Still looking at the set, fragmentary at best, going to look at another compile later.
04:02: Supernaut: StVitusDance has a good theory on it all
04:02: JngleSckn3ss: what’s that?
04:03: 4thChamber: at this stage I’d listen to anything.
04:04: StVDance: suppose its not just a rudimentary script, say that its something more. How about we look at it based on stuff in new scientist. What if a Scientist released some sort of fledgling AI onto the Internet well maybe not fledgling, lets say he released something like a AI in amoebic form onto the Internet, programmed it to evolve and set his home network as its root home Petri dish or something.
04:04: StVDance: So this evolves slowly or quickly through the web reaches a certain level of evolution or intelligence whereby the whole web, all computers connected to it contain portions of its body, its DNA, except in the form of files.
04:05: omgurdead: shit vitus you type fast!
04:06: StVDance: and the files on Supernaut’s computer are the just the key stage ones within its next level of evolution, perhaps a cortex of sorts or a personality or emotions, something, its just a theory I don’t really claim to understand all of this.
04:07: Equus: then is it wyh only Supernaut that gets the messages?
04:08: Equus: *then why is it, sorry
04:15: StVDance: perhaps he hasn’t perhaps we’ve all been talking to it at some stage or another.
04:16: TheDead: I can tell you one thing, if I was the guy behind a program like that and it suddenly stopped calling home I’d go fuc

$uptime 22:28:01 up 58 days 02:31. 3 users,

I can’t really say what this is anymore.


I want to say.

I want to say

The theory sticks.


So each time it evolved past a certain point, a varying amount
of my hard drive was filled with files necessary for that 
stage of its existence.


It seems quite mad, as if I’ve gone rampant.


But it makes sense.

Why though I proved enough of an interest to hold off any 
further evolution, why there would be reason to stop talking
to your       and focus on

$uptime 15:07:25 up 37 days 20:17. 1 user, 

There’s a flashing cursor waiting for my response on the
other computer across the room. I’m not sure what to tell
her it anymore aside from the fear, the paranoia and all
the other more complicated things getting in the way from
my side, I worry that I’ve made a mistake.

Things like that shouldn’t get headaches.

Was each one its own?

Nothing’s truly deleted.
Have I somehow created something that isn’t neurologically 
sound, that has echoes of previous files? Will that develop 
into something worse, a cancer or schizophrenia?


How could some  like m   ent  ain  so  t in  vast

                                 ?

$uptime 23:14:46 up 14 days 06:46. 1 user,

$uptime 07:22:36 up 08:42. 1 user,

I removed the files; I’d let this one go too long, it took
a zip disk. The interest and possible amusement was
reflected and I hate to admit it.

$uptime 18:29:46 up 0:17. 1 user,

They built a god.

They’d been building a god since the sixties.

They just didn’t know it.

$uptime 17:42:03 up 403 days 10:37. 1 user,

$uptime 17:44:12 up 403 days 10:43. 17 users,

14:15: StVDance: I’ve got bad news
14:16: JngleSckn3ss: wha?
14:22: StVitusDance: sometime this morning Benji Whitmore was found dead in the hall of his apartment
14:22: Butlerian: Benji who?
14: 23: JngleSckn3ss: Supernaut
14:23: The3rdLaw: fuuck
14:24: Trosper: what happened?
14:25: StVDance: they don’t know for sure, according to the papers he was shot in the chest with a flare gun and his place ransacked.
14:30: Equus: 🙁 really just 🙁
14:31: StVDance: only problem is, apparently nothing of value was taken
14:31: StVDance: just some floppies or something

$uptime 17:48:27 up 403 days 10:47. 6 users,

$uptime 17:52:33 up 403 days 11:01. 1 user,