The Egdoppler Takeover (a science fiction short story)

The Egdoppler Takeover
©2010GaryCGIBSON
All rights reserved

Since the piracy of one’s personal image became ubiquitous, there were those that set themselves the task of constructing personal visual face screening devices that could be powered with garment solar weave and power storage. Julius Egdoppler was the successful inventor of an electronic photon-bending field to make photography of one’s urban face impossible without consent. Millions of people sought to recover the personal privacy of an earlier age. In thousands of urban areas the blurred ‘Egdopplerface’ became a routine sight. Overnight Egdoppler became another of the world’s high tech billionaires. The face image-screening device was not his final project.

At age 38 Egdoppler moved offshore from Redondo Beach to a concrete dwelling ten miles offshore on the floor of the Pacific Ocean. From his dome laboratory he moved covertly into synthetic life physical interfaces with robotic and nano-composite structure ready-mix. In a few months of bringing together his ideas, the materials were broadcast worldwide and ready for use.

All of the brains were wired in a serial order for a maximally efficient computing array. Overnight a fast acting synthetic virus downloaded the human species into perpetual somnolence bordering upon coma. Scuttlebots connected such fallen humans where they lay with fiber-optic cables to the worldwide web taken over by Julius Egdoppler Inc and his human enhanced imaginative computing human serial processing unit.

Julius Egdoppler was a creative genius who had grown impatient in waiting for the progress of computer technical capability to reach human levels of dreaming and creative synthesis. Each human mind has trillions of synaptic connections and creative synthesis of the real world environment of sensation. Waiting for computer to develop sentience equal to that of humans was unacceptable for Julius. He needed the human race’s brain computation potential now in order to discover what new things could be discovered. Through his enslavement of human brains for his advanced computing projects, Julius Egdoppler would unlock the secrets of the Universe.

First things first. Just Los Angeles had six million viable salvaged human brains wired into his computing network. All of those former souls required biological maintainence, and scuttlebutts connected them to IV drips of synthetic nutrition. Eventually the bodies would be allowed to atrophy, after the human neural computing network discovered methods to isolate the brains in a healthy way while allowing the bodies to rot away in place. The brains might readily be encapsulated in neo-gel protein plexicases with advanced quantum computing circuitry through nano-technology infusion.

In the first two nights of human brain salvage in the United States 240 million bodies with conserved brains were brought into the Egdoppler Inc neural network. Eurasia yielded more than two billion more with the rest of the world providing brains for free computing power too. While chemical and nuclear plants broke down creaking global poisons, the scuttlebutt production facilities following custom Egdoppler designs increased the production of five basic forms of scuttlebutt required for the salvation of the human species as bio-stabilized slave computing units.

In most instances fine everwear webs were spun to encase the bodies of the brain processing units. These brains in the meanwhile were hard at work in a perennial rem sleep of dreaming for maximal work production. Given instructive suggestions, their minds were probed for content and neural circuits mapped. Synthetic duplication of their data contents formed with synthetic R.N.A. models of synaptic connections and arrays. The doubling of brain-mind computing or thought use by the twinned synthetic computing logic units would enhance eventual cluster mapping of thought processing of problems. For each human neural history had it’s own developmental historical programming traits that were unique programs formed through biological inheritance, experience and will. Julius Egdoppler’s plan was to exploit all of these billions of unique methods of problem solving to to solve the big questions he had to ask.

In several months Egdoppler had most of the former human minds and brains conditioned to using their maximum intellectual potential. The parallel processing capability of so many human brains was awesome-more than the contributing super-computers also wired into his network. The time arrived when he asked his network the three big questions.

Tapping on his computer keyboard, he posed the first question;

‘Why wouldn’t Shiela Liblosky go to the prom with me’?

Then he rapidly set in question two;

“How much does the Universe weigh?’

Followed quickly by the third question;

“Did Babe Ruth hate the Red Sox after he was sold like a cheap horse?”

The human neural network communicated globally with all of its translation and organizational capability for several minutes. An infinite number of answers were produced, and artfully at that.

The computer then died, before disclosing to Julius Egdoppler, what the answers were.