Welcome to The Baby wants It’s Bottle Poetry Inc. Podcast, a creative project by Martin Anton Smith a NZ based creative. In this episode, I read part five of my Dystopian Sci Fi Novella, “Marcel Atkins – The 22nd Centuries’ Brain Chip Hacker” Lets begin!

Marcel again awoke up exactly at 6:05am, to Ulysses, that hairy Moses-like State hologram come alarm clock, hovering above him, repeating the words “WAKEUP ZILO MARCEL WAKEUP AURORA NEEDS YOUR BRAIN AGAIN”. His voice sounded at first as a babbling brook but if ignored rose in decibel to a thousand cascading waterfalls. He got out of his levitating bed and looked at todays hologram beam off the studio walls. He was startled as the hologram of a giant scaly beak started snapping at him from above. He had forgotten he had programmed a simple “Riding the Pterosaur over the ancient forests” holographic simulation to wake him up and keep him company during breakfast. He thought better of it and commanded “End ‘Riding the Pterosaur’ and begin ‘Betelgeuse dual star flyby”. He now wanted a relaxing start to the day, not an adrenalized Jurassic one. Marcel had burnt himself out yesterday with all his day dreaming of the times of his late teens and early adulthood during the Starman Reconfiguration of 2051. The heady times where the StarPeople vaporized the G7 and military on the G7 podium and then over a period of 7 years ‘acclimatized’ everyone on Earth to the new system of heavy surveillance, exacting unemotional control. He requested some double shot Tropical Zone New Zealand coffee materialize. He tried to not allow the overwhelming feelings that were rising up in him, the last thing he’d want would be a stress sweat to begin.

He kept thinking of the enormity of this Rebellion idea of his. He kept asking himself “How can I save the World? I’m no hero, I’m just a fool who was blessed with a high IQ, and good analytical skills, I’m just an overgrown teenage video game playing loser’. But he was smart enough and experienced enough, now he was in his early 70’s realized that everyone who had ever risen up before 2051 and done something amazing had had the same negative thoughts and feelings and still chose to continue the ‘hero’s’ path. He knew courage was not about not feeling fearful, but feeling fearful and choosing to still climb the mountain.

He had swig of the auto generated coffee and he heard a voice in his head – ‘be thankful for your fear – you are one of the handful who can still feel it and therefore harness it for the revolution’. He had learnt to treasure those moments when some wise entity seemed to talk to him via his thoughts. This wise voice had come to him as he had got older and experienced and learnt. Of course it was not supernatural, it was simply the best of him distilled to maximum and wanting him to make good choices. It was the voice made possible by having a hacked BrainChip so that he could like the good old pre 2051 days, embrace emotion. This Voice was the voice of emotional intelligence -Wisdom. Marcel had tagged today as the day he put an operational plan in place to begin the second part revolution.

Marcel had always thought what he was planning now in 2103 as the ‘phase two’ of the revolution. The first phase was when he decided to hack the StarPeople/Aurora interfacing BrainChip surveillance technology in his brain, in the early 2050’s while as existing as a willing agent of Aurora and the StarPeople. The first stanza of the second phase had entailed learning like a revolutionary in waiting. Because of raw intelligence and inquisitiveness, he was an astute student of world history, and he knew being a successful revolutionary required astute knowledge of people and how they are organized by the tiny few already in power, who held all society’s drawstrings. While times had grown different in the 52 years since 2051, with an AI embracing tyrannical Alien species in charge, the principles of how the few can dominate the many were still in place. Marcels knowledge would be crucial to winning the Revolutionary War of 2103.

Using his great intellectual reserves Marcel had made a point of being an expert on how the Aurora system worked, How the Viceroys operated and how they got their instructions, how the StarPeople operated, how the Monetary and Economy system worked, how the cultural programming was set up. In short, he studied how the Alien machinery of domination of lower intelligence planetary species worked. After 50 plus years of keeping his eyes open, and his brain self-hacked, he viewed himself as ‘StarPeople/Aurora Earth Governance’ expert. He now knew his apprenticeship was over and now he would emerge as a butterfly does from the cocoon, and put his expertise to work in the now unfolding Revolutionary War. He had over the last 50 years crafted edited and re-written a strategy to win the war. He now had a final version of what would have to happen to win the war for mankind. It would be known in the future as the “The 7 Prime Directives of the Revolutionary War – or in its man on the street slogan version “7 for RE-WAR “. “REMEMBER SEVEN FOR REWAR”, was the go-to ‘battle cry’ when the dampened spirits of the Army Rebels were in need an immediate uplift. This naturally evolved to have 7 equal replies of ‘WE WILL’. Marcel’s ‘ 7 for ReWar’ were the following:

1. The opportunity to be self determinating due to the fact I – Marcel Atkins – hacked the Aurora Interface Chip in my Brain – Therefore for others to be free their Chips must be hacked as well.
2. This Hacking must happen in two stages – stage 1 hack the brain-chips of a small and embryonic elite fighting force, so as to allow them to be independently minded, from there regather and grow the revolutionary army further in 3 swift stages. If this is successful, we will have a Revolutionary Army with talent and numbers to beat Aurora and thus convince The StarPeople to retreat to their home start system.
3. The Viceroys are the key in the early timeline of the Re War- their brain interface files must be overtaken, so as to provide ample time for the Revolution to clandestinely begin destroying enemy infrastructure.
4. Given the reality of technological and IQ disadvantage, The Re-War must rely on the dual masterstrokes of ‘surpise attack’ and ‘speed’. the War should not last longer than 17 days, and ideally will be over within 11-14 days. Any longer than this and the likelihood of losing magnifies and compounds.
5. After Victory We must ensure that counter attacks are not physically or artificially remotely possible. There can be no later regathering of the StarPeople’s awesome defenses.
6. The Aurora physical policing Robots etc. must be overcome by remote deactivation command from a successfully hacked Aurora system. Brute force is not possible given the enemy’s physical resources.
7. After the War is won, a new system of economy, ecology and culture must prevail so as not to create another future alien invasion.

Marcel now had a war plan he just had to fill in the details to achieve all the points, and win the ‘ReWar’. He begun on point 1 – how to hack brains with perfection, whose brains to hack first, how to do it simultaneously and without Aurora knowing for as long as possible. He would get to Viceroys first, create a division and then forcibly reprogram them to avatar like Revolutionaries. There was no time to convince them organically via persuasion as Viceroys were chosen for their extreme loyalty to ‘dark forces’ – there was no way to reverse this, so they will be neutralized. This neutralization of the Viceroys and insertion of an artificial Rebel cyborg system into their empty shells would make the Revolutionary grow from one to 5, and then allow the Revolutionary army to gain closer system access to Aurora AI system.

Marcel had to act quick, the Viceroys would be meeting for their daily meeting with Aurora in 7 hrs time, he would have to duplicate his personality over onto the Viceroys Chips, add a personality variation factor so as to ensure maximum performance of this embryonic team. If Marcel does this correctly, he will have created a family of unstoppable brothers to advance the revolutionary way to the next stage.

Marcel knew there was only one chance to hack the Viceroy chips. Every Aurora Brain Chip interface had a daily micro reboot. He’d have to hack during one of the numerous daily a micro reboot that occur. This would mean he would have to hack the Aurora brain implant, upload the ‘Ghost in the Machine” i.e his personality variant he artificially created. He’d do the work in the 7 seconds reboot sequence, and when the Aurora link re authenticates the change would be completely masked. From that point he essentially had a double agent of the Revolution at his command.

Now he had to do the now not-so-boring technical legwork. He gave the command to open the holographic work portal, where he could clandestinely study for a weak part of the Viceroy Aurora reboot interface code. As Marcel had worked for Aurora as a tech who tested the BrainChip updates on live ‘test volunteers’ i.e Guineapigs, his opening and coding of files related to this would not draw suspicion. But a problem was happening. Planning a Revolution was a stressful event, given Marcel had hacked implant to allow this. This would normally be ok, as his coding would mask this file transfer – but only if the stress was minimal to moderate. This essentially meant he could not allow himself to stress out so much that he drew a physical sweat as Aurora would receive an ‘Emotion Error File (EEF)’ and then be aware his BrainChip is malfunctioning. From there the Robotic Army would be sent to deactivate Marcels faulty BrainChip and replace it. If that happened, they’d discover a tampered BrainChip and the Revolution would be over before it had ever truly begun.

For a microsecond Marcel almost blew it – he felt a sharp feeling of unease, and a sweat response begin, the itchy ‘pre sweat’ feeling. He had a trick to squash this feeling. After much trial and error he had found sweat causing stress reversed by a happy childhood memory. He simply thought of 2049, when is was 13 years old, and he had hit “6 Home Runs in 6 consecutive baseball innings, and the kids raised him on their shoulders. He did this and the sweat bead was stopped from existing in the first place. he was immediately relieved, and went to work. – he opened the VICEROY AI/Coding schematics in the holographic portal – The coding schematics of the VICEROY BRAINCHIP UPDATES were called V*A*L*K*Y*R*I*E for short – He and his ZILO config technical colleagues had called it this after binging on WW2 holographic documentary’s back 50 years ago in the early days of reconfiguration. the irony of this name wasn’t lost on Marcel, he just hoped to not repeat 20th Century History and be seen as was Count Staufenberg in 1940 – the “hero who didn’t quite kill the evil overlord”. Marcel’s Job was much harder that Staufenberg’s was in 1940 – Marcel wasn’t stopping a Hitler in his tracks – he would be tasked with stopping an entire advanced Alien civilisation. Marcel had always backed himself, but this mission was clearly facing ridiculously bad odds of success. But Marcel knew that regardless of success or failure it was always better to die trying when fighting evil than to live under evil’s yoke.

…………end of pt 5………pt 6 is coming very soon… in the near future…..

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