An Agent Is Born

You weren’t there. You don’t know what it was like…how the hell could you? Today’s generation wants to paint the Perpetuum Project as some kind of evil cabal bent on xenocide. And, in your minds, the worst of the project were Agents like me. Well screw you! I’m not taking the rap for the whole world. We all thought what we were doing on Nia was the right thing. Well, for a while we did anyway.


Look. You seem a reasonable type. I’ve spent 60 years with this damned stigma and for once I’d like to get someone from the younger generations to see it from the perspective of the early 23rd century. You know…where we were then as a planet, how we were thinking. You got a few minutes? Let me tell you how it happened from my perspective.


I was still just a kid really. I’d graduated from Yonsei Uni with a degree in NT. At the time Nano Tech was big. We’d all heard about the wormhole and how nanobots were the only thing we could send through, so just about all the science undergrads had switched majors thinking that’s where the future was. Shit. Waste of my damned time. I might as well have gone for philosophy for all the good NT did me. I ended up going to work for Yun-thui MR….that’s Military Research…running dubs in Chile. You never heard of dubs? Hell, here your generation is all pissed off about what we did on Nia and you never even heard of the W-Series CIRP and what we used to do with them. Ha! Boy would you get your knickers in a bunch if I told you about that. Look it up some time….CIRP stands for Counter Insurgency Reconnaissance Platform. The W-Series was one bad ass machine.


Anyway, I ended up running dubs for about 6 years…thought my entire life was going to consist of splashing the Socs and Commies making trouble for the mega corps. Turned out I was pretty good interfacing with the spark that was in the dubs. Spark. You never heard of Sparks? It’s short for Sparkle. They’re the AI nanos that allowed us to control robots remotely. Techs come a long way since then, the last Spark was scrapped almost half a century ago. Helluva sad day for retired agents like me.


Like I was saying, I turned out to be pretty good with sparks. My boss at Yun-thui came to me one day and told me to report to medical. Turned out to be a psych eval. I had no clue why they were testing me until they offered me a job as an agent. Of course I took it. The planet was starved for energy for one. And, who was going to turn down an opportunity to look through a wormhole and see what was on the other side? They packed me off to Beijing and I went through an intensive course on Warfare Tech. Only the top 5% were allowed to continue and out of them only a few of us had the tolerance for the neuro integration chipsets they implanted. It was hell on the people who rejected their chipsets….some of them went crazy, some of them ended up partially paralyzed….some of them even died. I was lucky. Or. At least at the time I felt pretty lucky.

After I completed the course and had the chipset implant they loaded me up with a bunch of software. Only problem is the human brain can only take so much data in at once. It would take years of software updates before I felt truly competent as an agent. Every few days I’d soak up software extensions until my brain was reeling. I’d get migraines that would have knocked Ali out. Muhamed Ali. No, ah lee, he was a 20th Century pugilist….fighter…boxer. Oh hell, never mind, they outlawed the sport when I was still a kid but he was a big name for about 200 years after he died.


Once I’d recovered from the implant I was sent over to integrate with my spark. Basically it was like speed dating for Agents. We integrated with one spark after the next until we made a connection with one that really clicked. I ended up with a Geinos Mk1…my Jeanie….

Sorry, where was I? Right…Jeanie. She was a good gal. Not too smart at first, the project kept the AI strictly limited at the beginning. We agents figured out ways to strip the AI limiters bit by bit as time went by but, when it was all new, Jeanie was just a beautiful voice without much of a personality. I had a helluva time getting her to sync with me as closely as I needed. And believe me, once the shit hit the fan on Nia, how well in sync you were with your spark made every bit of difference. It got to the point where Jeanie was reading my thoughts before I even knew I was thinking.

But, like I said, at first it was a helluva time. I remember the day they sent Jeanie through the wormhole…..