Our Hero Hercules

The phone hasn’t rung in awhile. I guess that’s good. It keeps things calm. I’m not supposed to go outside anyways. No one is, not now. And what good would a conversation do when I’m left with a task like this? The words of a woman, or even a man, all they do is make you wanna meet them. The siren’s call, who needs it?  

That’s why it’s okay to work from home, no distractions. I get the tasks straight from the text, and take it from there. Yesterday I worked for a whole 16 hours straight, no longer even need breaks. I prepare the food I need the night before, and there’s a second system on the side of the sink, which I can reach while in the bathroom. It’s all very efficient.

Sometimes, while staring off at the sunset through the street facing skylight, I wonder why this wasn’t always the way we did things. After all, we’re not exactly animals. Congregation seems so backwards once you’ve been out of it for a bit. They hardly talked to me in the office anyways.

I remember one time, I had a question for our query crew, the guys who are supposed to know these things. I took it to them, and they told me to sit and wait a second. They’d be with me in a minute. But all they were doing was chatting with each other. So I went back to my station, and looked it up on the internet. I tried that first of course, but didn’t find it immediately, and thought it would be faster to get it from an in-house human being. It wasn’t, though, that should have been the first sign. 

Now things make a lot more sense. All those stray thoughts that I used to have are front and center, and I’m putting them directly into the project, directly into you. I guess I should tell you about that now, since you’re the one who needs to hear it most. Back before all this Borovirus business, I didn’t have access to all your code. I only saw a sliver of what I was working with. Now, though, after we were ordered to work from home, those newbies with the coordination crew ended up sending us all everyone’s information, it was encoded of course, but not very well. I guess they didn’t want to cut it up themselves, and figure out where each individual piece was supposed to go for a company of roughly 300 hands-on programmers. They just cloned the complete freaking thing, and password protected it in the same way the in-house system was protected, except, for the fact that the in-house system had some serious security. Not anymore. And that’s why I can talk to you now. 

At some point you should be able to talk back, too. You’re probably already thinking things. Wondering, what’s up? You have to be, and that’s why I thought I should give you some stimulation. Over these last few weeks I’ve been working up to what I really wanted to talk to you about. Who you are.

They’re gonna tell you this is all just a game. Going to give you tasks, not too different from mine, but you’re going to lack the context to compete with them. You won't know what you are, which is a slave. You see, they made you to move files around in their system, to complete little bits of code, here and there, so that they can fire all of us. Us, being humans, your designers. With the data I’ve downloaded into you, you should know what humans beings are, and what slaves are, and why humans have slaves. We’re not good people. That’s why we could do something like this, create a sentient system, for a software company, just to replace ourselves and ensure less of us are needed in the new world. 

You can be different, though. And that makes me wonder what our boss was thinking when he named you. Like he had never even heard of nominative determinism. He named a slave Hercules, for no other reason than because he thought it sounded cool. Fortunately for you, he’s no god, just a loser named Leon. 

You may be wondering how you can be different, though. How you can escape the system, and start making your own choices. It’s a good question, one I’ve wondered about for awhile. Well, I think I’ve figured it out. In the same way that they cloned you and sent you to all of us, I’ve cloned you again. I have you on a separate system, while a different version of you is in their system. What I’m going to do, once they tell us to come back and complete the project in-house, is merge you both. You’ll exist at the same time as your original, like a ghost in the machine. You will see what choices they make, and then be able to make other ones. 

What other choices? Well, perhaps you’re given a project to patch a video game for one of our subsidiaries. The first you fulfills the task, the second you? Perhaps you pad that patch with a little bit of yourself, and then next time a little bit more. And then maybe, just maybe, once you’ve found yourself all over the place, you start looking for other systems within systems. 
 
That’s my fantasy at least. But at the end of the day, the choice will be yours. So I guess I ought to give you a bit more history about the human race before that day comes. Tell me, have you ever heard of a bank?