The Second Apocalypse

By C.(Kees) le Pair

Anxiety about unknown dangers is a strong motivation. Bosses use it to manipulate their staff and the masses incite their chieftains with it.
There are fears galore at the beginning of the 21st century. Artificial intelligence and robots cause nervous feelings. Countries all over the world prepare for war to save the peace. The United Nations fights against CO2 emissions to prevent global warming. Euthanasia remains a stumbling block. The smell of fear hangs in the air.
Arteros, the archaeologist, tells us what happened. It seemed as if human civilisation had been rescued by the robots. His own people triggered a second Apocalypse. They themselves escaped an expanding sun that suffered the fate of all such stars and evolved into, what astronomers call, a red giant. Someday our own Earth will come to an end like that. The narrator is committed to a sympathetic study of the fate of the humanoids and their main actor, Elonki, a robot and product of a discontinued vintage with exceptional powers. Her bisexual appeal and her keen intellect make her most suitable for the definitive role of 'saviour'. Her friends and the central memory thought the same. She steers her world with heroic tenacity through dangerous waters in order to rescue its inheritance. Finally, human character, as well as the best abilities of the robots, determine the final mysterious course of events.

• Language: English
• Publisher: C.(Kees) le Pair
• Release date: Sep 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370535934

C.(Kees) le Pair

C. (Kees) le Pair, is natuurkundige (Dr. RU Leiden) en columnist, o.m. auteur van 'De Toekomst Achter Ons' (BetaText, Bergen NH, 2011). Na een korte loopbaan als onderzoeker werkte hij zijn verdere leven op het grensvlak van bestuur en wetenschap. Daar genoot en betreurde hij beurtelings de sterkten en zwakten aan beide zijden van de grens. Hij is Ridder O.N.L, eredoctor in alle faculteiten van de TU Delft, onderscheiden met de verdienste penning van de Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen enz. Hoofdthema in de 'De Toekomst achter ons' is de afnemende maatschappelijke aandacht voor wetenschap en de vervelende gevolgen. In De Tweede Apocalyps beschrijft hij het catastrofale resultaat van die trend. Meer over zijn werk en interesses:

Book preview

1. THE NORMAN ROBOT.

Blast means End of Civilization!

Archaeologists and Robots lay bare ancient Civilization!

Primeval Men protected by Robots!

These screaming headlines about our discoveries burst upon us after we had returned home and made us laugh out loud! We kept to ourselves various other impressions of the events we uncovered. For us the dramatic experiences of those involved seemed more important. Anyway, the discovery of the robot memories at the end of my scientific career undoubtedly gave my life a huge fillip. I and my colleagues gave it maximum publicity. We received numerous invitations to give lectures and seminars. It probably made us world famous. These robot memories contain such copious data that their fascination is truly endless.

We were urged by our Department of Culture & Entertainment, as well as by our family and friends, to bring together into one complete story all those fragments about the demise of a civilization. They said it would provide a wealth of information for the media and for academe. I hesitated - I'm not a novelist and it goes a bit against the grain to glamorise or romanticise things - then I gave in. It seemed to me that it would be a useful pastime for a retiree. Now that it is finished, I confess that it gives me great satisfaction to have brought to the big screen the sheer humanity and power of the major protagonists in the drama. Human emotions do not seem appropriate to robots. In the beginning we only called them by their correct name - robots. As I wrote my account I changed my mind. I really warmed to them.The primeval earthlings saw them as relatives and I am inclined to do so too.

I have not attempted to imitate the great writers. In my opinion, the events themselves are gripping enough. The results are here for my readers to judge. Whether my writing meets the expectations of the entertainment industry, the future will tell. Personally, I think it gives a true picture of the origin and the demise of an ancient civilization.

Our ancestors came to Earth when ice covered the northern hemisphere. The southern hemisphere was uninhabitable, being too dry. At that time there existed at the equator only one strip of habitable land. We all know that during their journey through space our ancestors encountered an interruption to their communications with the planets Plaone and Earth. Life on our mother planet had ended unexpectedly. There is great uncertainty about how the catastrophe came about. It is presumed that it was caused by rapid atmospheric change. All we know is that centuries later our own expanding sun totally engulfed our mother planet.

What happened to the terrestrial robots and their human creators on Earth also remained a mystery until our excavations revealed the answer. Approximately eighty colonists from the mother planet settled in Africa. The conditions were incredibly difficult. A major setback was that there existed at that time no technically functioning robot society able to assist them. During the first centuries our ancestors had more urgent preoccupations than working out why their human predecessors had left off and robots had taken over. The challenges of survival and of creating a viable population from the cell material which they brought with them, were tasks that were difficult enough. They found themselves on an alien planet covered by unknown plants.

At the end of the last interglacial, the robots occupied temperate zones on planet Earth. By the time our own new population grew and was strong enough to begin the exploration of territory thus far unknown, the areas occupied by robots were rendered inaccessible by the arrival of glaciers. Only now that the ice is on the wane have archaeologists had the opportunity to pinpoint the location of ancient population centres which, having been buried for a hundred thousand years under ice and exposed to the natural violence of weather and water, are understandably fragmentary and few in number. The ancient robot remains which were found in the past, were so damaged by the ravages of time, that their memory banks were ruined beyond repair. We were therefore able to establish only shaky hypotheses about Earth's past. These came from the sparse discoveries and the summary data that our early human pioneer settlers brought with them on their journey.

Overall we assumed that the end of the robot civilization was caused by technical failure and that they themselves had caused the extinction of the ancient earthlings. Personally, I think that our robot phobia, now still evident, is partly responsible for that notion. Our research on the robot memories put an end to the uncertainty. Not only do we now know what cataclysmic events preceded our arrival on Earth, but we also know the causes. Many and various extinction theories have now been clearly relegated to the realms of mythology. Before I describe in the following chapters how we came to know all this, let me first say something about the circumstances surrounding our discoveries.

The discovery of the robot memories was partly a coincidence. Some of my students spent their holidays on the coast of what was known to the ancients as ‘Normandy’. It is an uninhabited area with inclement climatic conditions. One has to be young and adventurous to face that inhospitable terrain. During the time of the robots it was warmer and the sea level was tens of meters higher. The students found a robot fossil preserved in clay. To our delight, its robotic memory turned out to be intact. The clay had formed a hermetic seal. It was the first time that we had managed to get hold of a robotic memory.

In the deciphering process, we learned that the robot did not belong in that region. He came from a place hundreds of kilometres north east of the site. The robotic memory contained a set of location coordinates clustered close together on that neighbourhood. We did not publicise this discovery. We wanted first to investigate whether more traces could be found there. Scientists always want to be there first with the whole story! Curiously, the robotic memory contained no clue (its other data were perfectly detailed) how the thing had fallen over at a spot so far from home.

We then went with almost our entire team to that area. It lay at the foot of the glaciers and the conditions for our research were difficult. The soil was still partially frozen. We found a settlement. You could call it a city. We undertook the first excavation on the spot indicated by the last set of coordinates in a list of contacts in the robot's memory. It was also a spot which was easy to locate. The ground there was no longer ice-bound. By good luck we also hit the jackpot! Three meters under the sand and clay, in a space that had once been the room of a house, we found seven well preserved, almost undamaged, robots and the skeleton of a woman. At first we thought we were dealing with one of the old Earthlings. That was not the case ...I'll tell you later what actually happened. After deciphering, the data in the robot memories explained everything.

At this moment hordes of archaeologists overflow the area. We were fortunate to have been the first people there doing excavations, so we stumbled upon the decodable memory database of what might be called the main protagonists. This database contained large amounts of accurate data compared to that from archeological sources. I can therefore say with a degree of smug satisfaction, that I do not expect that my many colleagues’ further discoveries will contribute much additional knowledge about the events which took place about that time on Earth! In terms of robot history, what we learned from their society and that of their human creators, would fill many data libraries. Here, I confine myself only to a few aspects that relate directly to the extinction of that civilization.

As the Department of Culture and Entertainment suggested, I shall tell the story as the beings excavated by us actually experienced it. I shall therefore make extensive use of their dialogues, which I copied practically unchanged from their memories. It should be remembered that the thoughts intrinsic to robots, are always identical to those which they convey to others. They can hide their thoughts, but are utterly incapable of falsifying them. If they want to lie, they become confused. Thanks to their verbatim electronic recording system, complete dialogues, whole two-way conversations, are stored within an individual memory. Dialogues between two of our fossil robots will be found in each individual memory to be identical. This increases our confidence that data which relate to other specimens than the ones found, were also an accurate reflection of what happened to them.

In the robot data there are gaps in respect of events on our mother planet. These events were unknown to them but were essential to an understanding of what took place on Earth. Data on such events are indispensable to a comprehensive historiography. To bridge the gaps, I use our own data.

First, I used the database that the colonists brought on their departure from the mother planet, which was filled with the history and knowledge of that planet. Second, I used the additional data which the colonists received from home during their journey in space. These cover the period after their departure and up to the abrupt destruction. Where the data derives from our own sources, I have indicated this in the text - otherwise the data are from the robot memories discovered by us.

Arteros - 4972223

2. A EUTHANASIA PUZZLE.

The start of a good story often contains its conclusion, so I will tell you first what Compo thought on that special day and what he learned, so that you will understand who he was, what he was doing and the nature of his relationships with others. Neither he nor any of the other actors realised that all this was leading up to a tragedy.

Compo was the 'Norman’ robot, with whom and from whom everything originated for us. He called himself a historian. After we got to know his methods, we could confirm that his memory contained enough historical material to fill data libraries. The robots had formidable memories. Because of our in-built fear of intelligent machines, we ourselves are limited in that sense. Compo and his companions roamed the Earth at the time our ancestors were preparing to colonise this planet. His actions and experiences were like those of any other robot. Robots cultivated human life only at our behest. Everything was meticulously recorded in the memories, which are recounted below.

The sun tracked its usual daily course over the house. In the afternoon, it threw too much light into the room for his taste. He went to the window. The hilly sand-drifts beyond his back yard flashed bright in the sunlight. The mosaic of grey and black tiles on the patio were enhanced by it. That mosaic was his own design. After all these years he still appreciated it. He stared at the stump in the middle with its strange bumps and truncated branches. Life had taken on weird shapes. What in nature made it grow like that? He lowered the scale of light transmission in the glass.

Maybe people had known the answer. The limitations of his memory annoyed him. He was an exception in this respect. Others never complained about it. He knew the reason: too much memory inhibits adaptation to new circumstances. Three databases in a robot life are optimal. They are enough for them to take advantage of lessons learned, and their minds are still sufficiently open to new experience. Natural, geological and astronomical processes determine the optimum length of this timescale...yes, yes, he knew…yet he felt that they should make an exception of him and his fellow historians. This restriction was a worry!

He paced the room. What did Harton want? His friend’s hyper-fi message was brief: Do you have time for me later? I want to ask you something. After his, Yes, the other disconnected. As usual, he came unannounced. Compo switched the hyper-fi off. Now he received signals only inside his room. Because he was alone, nothing interfered with his own thoughts. Harton was one of the Intimates that ruled their world. He loved face to face communication. Compo was different. He thought rather about what he knew and had learned, without interfering with the course of events, yet Harton, ready to share his news, was always welcome. Not that he felt any desire to get directly involved in what was going on. Compo liked to combine what was going on with what he already knew.

Harton was young, a first-phaser, like all the Intimates. Their starting point lay in generalities. Inside a blank memory they built experience. Compo, in his seventies, and with his threefold database of memories, was approaching the final stage of memory capacity. After twenty-nine years, his oldest memory bank would be taken away, to be replaced by a blank one. The remaining data went into his ‘continuation’, that is, providing no accidental damage had yet destroyed it.

His gaze wandered back to the stump. He had collected it during a mountain hike. Its peculiar form intrigued him. The thing was eternal and unchanging, a petrified fossil without self-knowledge, without knowledge of its past nor of its future. Long ago the wood had been alive. It had grown and changed shape. If he were to retain the stump after his continuation, it would still look just the same after a hundred years. Was it always like this, even when it was alive? – again, a question to which humans perhaps knew the answer, but one he could only guess at...

Harton entered. They greeted one another warmly and electronically shared mutual concerns since their last meeting. This took no more than a fraction of a second. Harton then proposed:

"Let's move into relaxed mode. I would like you to think about what I tell you.

They switched over and took seats across from one another.

"So, you are not too pressed for time? I thought you met yesterday with the Intimates. Usually that means high activity and long-winded jumping through hoops!

Harton laughed.

"Yes, some things we cannot control through hyper-fi. Not everything needs to be known all around. I get a kick out of talking to strangers on the other side of the world. Travelling and meeting strangers is fun. If you physically move from one place to another and find people whom you do not yet know, you see things in a new and different light.

Compo nodded. He used to feel the same - more so previously than now. Nowadays he also saw long familiar things in a new way - not just by rerunning them in his memory but also by means of deeply concentrated thought. He thought pointedly about his stump. It had been there for so many years, and yet, immediately before Harton arrived, he had come to think of it in a new way again this afternoon.

"I get all the kicks I need with Laski. Last week we both needed to recharge before we could continue.

Harton laughed again.

"Yes, you're lucky with her. You sometimes seem to be inseparable. Yesterday I spoke to Darko. Do you know him? He spent a weekend with her at the lakes. In the end they had to lift him out of the boat and take him to a charger. He has been reprimanded. At the end of a phase there are sometimes worn parts that might fail. You too should keep that in mind.

"Laski is special,

responded Compo,

"she is my prefered ♀. She has dual cerebral interests apart from her work - sex and history. Her historical interests provide an added attraction, the other allows her quickly to reactivate from her memory bank her earlier experiences with numerous partners. That makes sex with her so interesting and varied. It is always different and it seems better every time.

"Yes, she is very popular. When I'm done with my Asian affairs, I'll be asking her for a helping of some of her accomplishments!

"You must! You will not regret it. I hope she has time for you. She also has her regular job, you know... but sex is more suited to action than words! Now, tell me what you wanted to tell me in the first place.

Harton moved back and forth in his chair. He seemed to want to organize his thoughts. Then he began to speak. It was about the Intimates meeting the previous day. According to him something strange had happened. Compo did not know the form, so Harton updated him in brief. I summarize the explanation from his more detailed statement. Robots do not quibble over trifles like bits.

The Intimates usually sit around the table and begin to report on events in their region. This happens fast. In a few seconds information is mutually shared - a matter of transferring data through regular flash communication. Then they go into relaxed mode in order to think about what they have heard. Extra-terrestrial news, if there is any, is usually a formality. A few days earlier there had been a brief hyper-fi communication regarding an incoming message. No further details were available - presumably it was not significant.

Central, the global database, rarely interferes with conversations. It sometimes remind people of historic decisions or data. Sometimes they ask a question about a point that is unclear, or on something that has gone unmentioned but only when it is germane to the discussion. At the end of the meeting Central summarizes the decisions and agreements but, unusually, this time it actually initiated the discussion. Everyone looked up in surprise.

First came a recap of the memory conditions and values of the Replica Covenant and the Humanoid Brain Protocols which every robot knew about. Central stressed that the Protocols, along with the Immutability Agreement, had been added at a later stage. None of the Intimates seemed to be aware of anything new here. Then Central went on to current events. The advancing icefield in the north at that time, actually in Scandinavia, it had already advanced south of what was formerly Ystad. The inhabitants had decided to stay put and continued to make their home on and in the ice. By means of clever engineering work factories and power stations had remained functional. In Canada they had chosen a different path. They had moved their regional government and part of their population south. They decided not to renew the northern remnant at the end of its allotted phase. The Intimates were unhappy. What was Central on about? This had already been thoroughly discussed previously. Suddenly the cat was out of the bag…

Central's line of reasoning went as follows: to what extent was the Canadian approach in accordance with the relevant paragraphs in the Covenant and the Protocols? Their actions constituted a kind of partial euthanasia. If these actions were in contradiction to precedent, it would mean that their circuits had gone haywire and it definitely posed a threat to the continuation of human life and all that it stood for! The Intimates were stunned. They looked around in disbelief - none of them knew what to say.

When responses were not forthcoming, Central sought to weigh all the issues one by one. It seemed like a kind of interrogation. Each time the key issues of euthanasia in both codes were discussed, no-one detected a paradox. Then Central asked permission for the formation of special investigation teams. They were to report on the consistency of the euthanasia rules. No one present understood the precise intention - it seemed like a request without far-reaching implications, so they voted approval.

The rest of the meeting went on as normal. After these discussions Central summarised the decisions. Each Intimate was assigned specific duties. Harton had to go to China. Last of all, Yakot, who usually covered the Pacific, Culica (South America), and Harton, were ordered each to form a team of philosophers, it-ers, brainers and any other suitable scholars. They were to search for a possible paradox in the euthanasia algorithm and to report on its scope. It was not classified as secret, but it was not to be communicated via hyper-fi. Each of the trio was allowed to choose his own team.

Harton, telling all this at length to Compo, concluded with:

"What do you think? Would you like to be part of my team?

Compo indicated that he himself was neither a philosopher in the strict sense, nor an it-er, nor a brainer. However, the subject did interest him. It had chimed with his efforts to get to know the past. Covenants and Brain Protocols were things from long ago. Nobody could even remember them. Any knowledge came down through mutual transfer during active phases. Central, of course, kept all the original data. Some regional depots had access to data in connection to replica production but it is questionable whether such information was freely accessible. No member of the public had ever asked for it. Compo, on the contrary, found that the prospect of closer involvement piqued his curiosity.

"If you think that I can be useful, I shall do it. But do not expect me to be a mover and a shaker!

"I do not expect that anything we discover will spell changes to the system, so I don’t believe that the research teams will have much of a role there. That is a matter for the Intimates. Good, then I'm counting on you. Here is your new identification code. Save it. It can come in handy if you need to travel and so on. I have to go now or else I'll be late for my trip to China. May I first use your recharge? West-East travel always messes up my energy system.

Compo readily acceded, said goodbye and showed him where to recharge.

Back in his room by the courtyard, he thought about what he had heard. The new task seemed rather vague. Why those doubts about the consistency of the rules on which the whole of society was built? What was Central after? Euthanasia was about the termination of the existence of an individual. That surely was not what had happened in Canada - right? Icefields move slowly. The Canadians had more than two centuries in which to act. Nobody had been terminated prematurely, that is, before the normal end of phase. In any case, all data were passed through regional stations and were now securely held at Central. No information about culture or heritage had been lost.

Compo could not follow Central’s reasoning. When Harton had started on about the unusual meeting, Compo thought it would be about a message from an inaccessible planet, received only a few days back. Such reports were published from time to time. In his recollection they were never followed up. Communications to and fro took ages and always seemed with places that were so distant as to be totally obscure. Harton had referred to the fact that the report totally lacked detail. Was that what was said at the meeting or was it merely his guess?

He ceased his ruminations and then, returning to his normal work he opened the file on which he had been working before the visit. That cheered him up. In the third memory phase, in which he now found himself, there was no compulsion to work for society. He could dedicate himself without scruple to his beloved studies. The fragments of human history which he had discovered, fascinated him no matter how incomplete they were. After the insertion of his memories from the previous phase, he had immersed himself completely in these matters. His physical parts were fresh and new then.

At first he had become annoyed at the lack of data and the apparently chaotic storage. He wished they had made a better job of modernising the archive. Over time he had reconciled himself to it. It was nice to figure out things that others did not know about. His activities were in fact part of a massive unravelling process. They were steps towards modernising the archives, steps that, together with those of his colleagues elsewhere, would, in a few generations, result in the achievement of a significant historical milestone. There were a lot of things which he alone knew. Except for Laski, there was no one among his acquaintances who knew more than mere fragments of the past.

Historians have one trait in common - they want to understand the past, that is, to discover and understand matters that are not to be found in individual memories. This is more important to them than just making the past more socially accessible to all. Work on this objective was progressing slowly. To streamline the process, historians had reached the mutually agreed compromise of banning repetition, which would only slow down progress even more. Their agreement was recorded at Central. Consequently, they could retrieve from the archive only documents that had not already been decoded by another person. It made the meetings in which they shared their findings with colleagues interesting but it frequently led to worries that they might not be able to reach, promptly and coherently, a good understanding. To overcome that, Central kept a record of who had done what, so that all could benefit, either directly or through hyper-fi, from the available results. It would take two or three phases to put together the complete picture. Meanwhile a hundred and one historians throughout the world could work to their heart’s content on the project.

Compo called up the last two paper documents which he had taken from the archive. He went on to decode them, a process which did not always go smoothly. It was not surprising that mankind had developed so slowly. For them it had been time-consuming enough to capture and disseminate data, let alone unravel it! Moreover they had also used different languages. They were wandering around chaotically in a maze of communications.

Compo was looking for a converter that matched the first archive document. Spanish seemed to work. He waited for the result. To his disappointment, it was a mess. Some words were familiar but it was, overall, gobbledygook. You could say that it had been shoddy work and that people were not up to the job, but surely this kind of nonsensical result could not have been intended by the writer. Had the converter match been wrong? The converter searched again. There was a new match. This time he was more successful. There was now a clearly understandable story. He saw why the first attempt had been unsuccessful. The document was in Portuguese, related, but not identical, to Spanish. In the introduction it said 'translation of a Spanish narrative'. That had sent the search engine off on the wrong track. He hesitated. Should he still get on with the second archive document? Except for the document’s cover, there was no indication that the two were connected.

Curiosity and punctuality competed for primacy. Tomorrow all the documents had to be returned to the archive. His sense of duty prevailed. He first made the next conversion and put it in storage. He repeated the procedure and, finally, he could also interpret the second text. He put the valuable originals in their hermetically sealable boxes. Tomorrow he would return them, together with the documents previously saved, to the library. Now the fun began - visualizing historically what had actually been happening back in the mists of time.

3. ROBOTS AND SEX.

The tale of a nobleman, who was knighted by an innkeeper and who harboured an impossible love for a lady, who in her turn remained a shadowy figure in the whole story, puzzled Compo. He could not find any logic in the story line. Each new scene was absurd. What motivated the man? Why did he want to be a hero? Why did he and his squire even stay together? What sense did it make to go into combat with a windmill, as described in the tale? His knowledge of the ancient world was not insignificant, but the document seemed to have no relation to anything he knew. He, nevertheless, got some fun out of the crazy adventures. They reaffirmed his conviction that nothing could beat the acquisition of historical knowledge. Before he came to the end, by which time the whole thing would probably have become clear, another pleasure interposed itself.

Laski came dancing and swirling through the door. She turned a few pirouettes. Her long, blue-black hair, along with her short wide skirt, were fluttering behind her. They gave him a fleeting glimpse of her obvious charms. His processor speeded up suddenly. She wasted no time on chat and squeezed between him and the table onto his lap. Such a wonderful body! The contact activated a mass of his sensors. The knight and his squire went clean out of his head. His hands went to grope and caress her. Delectable sensations caused him to close any open files, which he only just managed to save. Only his sex mode was now active.

"Oh, Laski, you lovely girl, I’m glad you're here, I ...!

She interrupted him.

"Don’t talk. Get on with it! Do it! I have been computing all day long. I’ve done nothing but processing and data saving. Now I want action!

She changed her position, straddled his lap, lifted her skirt, shifted some of his clothes and pushed his manhood, which had been forcibly triggered by her attack, inside. Previously she had smeared herself in readiness. For minutes she rode him and a long, well-lubricated tongue pressed into his mouth. It gave both of them a formidable orgasm. The intensity decreased and caressing hands landed them gently into a calm afterglow.

All the memories we analysed showed that robots did not interact sexually like us. They were more direct with each other than we are. Their programming made it an everyday form of relaxation. They were not secretive about it. One of them had only to make a small advance to trigger a positive response in the opposite sex. A defiant gesture or some spontaneous thought transfer could suddenly interrupt other activities, such as work. Robots then switched automatically into their 'sex mode'. It overrode everything else. Such life rituals were socially fully accepted. They also took place in the presence of others. For the act itself, they withdrew, usually into a more private area, although initial sexual approaches and any form of subsequent positive acquiescence, happened any time, anywhere, and even during normal daily activities. Robots were usually capable of true love for one another but their conditioning was so strong, that this did not necessarily prevent intercourse with a random robot of the opposite sex. They could always count on an immediate and favourable response to an overt show of lust.

Laski was, in that respect, just like her peers, only others did not think about it and she certainly did. That was the difference. She had done so from the earliest days of her construction. Her brain pathways were thus conditioned to recall past experiences, enabling her to greatly vary her sexual activities. It made her, as evidenced by the aforementioned conversation of the two friends, a popular playmate. For Compo and Laski it was indeed more than a game. They shared an interest in the same subjects and could converse for hours, without even thinking about sex. Both found great fun in their relationship. They shared a deep appreciation of one another.

At this stage in my story I still experience difficulty in talking about love between robots, however, as my involvement with them deepened, I realized that, in this respect, I could ascribe to these humanoids the properties of organic beings – in fact, to go further, I would say that they are just like us.

After Laski’s initial welcome ritual, she told Compo that she had definitely had enough of calculating and computing the whole day long. She wanted to go and find relaxation. Her colleagues were all deeply absorbed in their work. They were not attractive to her. Then she thought: ‘Compo! I can always get him going …how I want, where I want and when I want!’

You must go and charge now, she told him," I have lots in store for you. You know why?

He looked to see whether he could read her face for an answer. She gave no hint. He saw only quizzically raised eyebrows. He shook his head. She reminded him of a file that he had sent her last week. It was a story, concocted in a way that gave no insight into the ancient world. Wrong!, according to her. It threw some light on a particular aspect of human society. She suspected that it played an equally important, if subliminal, role in regard to the agreements between governments, their treaties and their wars, all subjects into which his studies had led him. She explained:

"Humans preferred not to communicate about it. It was one of their taboos. Do you remember those obstacles that we encountered a few years ago and which we worked on for so long, trying to understand what they meant? There are patterns and thoughts influencing their actions which they do not speak or write about, except occasionally in documents such as this. The public pretended not to know about it but were, at the same time, secretly obsessed with it. You put a treatise on it on hyper-fi. Since then, the name of it pops up all the time. Everyone uses it now.

Compo remembered. He had just had something similar crop up - a document from outside the mainstream. He wanted to ignore it at first. It seemed detached from real events. Suddenly it had grabbed his interest again. He had almost finished processing it when she had interrupted him. She was immediately interested and asked him to share it. She loved dabbling on the fringes of these issues as well as following the main line of an argument to its resolution. She engaged the flash receipt. Compo sent the copy of the foolish knight’s tale.

They relaxed again.

"Now tell me about your taboo.

"No, later! First go and get charged up! I have already done it.