The Machine

Dio glanced at the faces around him, wondering what world these people were leading him into. "So you're telling me that they're perfectly aware of our activities?" "Of course. They're not bullheaded. They've understood for a while now that the stronger you hold sand in a fist, the more grains slip through your fingers." he heard the transient say, his synthetic voice perfectly adjusted to appear to be coming from the location of his equally illusory body. "Call it confidence in their control. Actively squashing any and all subversion only breeds more subversion. Instead they’re comfortable laying back and letting us run amok; confident that we don’t pose a threat.”

Overlayed onto Dio’s vision as a part of the local consensus reality, Prom’teo’s figure seemed to look straight at him. Still, Dio understood that if Prom’teo was looking at him at all it would be through one of surveillance bugs that were pervasive throughout the Ark.

“Do you know why they’re confident of that, Dio?”

Dio frowned, understanding full well that the question was a test meant to ascertain whether he was worth the transient's attention. It bothered Dio. Language was such a fickle thing. That idea that you could size up an individual’s mind through mere conversation seemed oddly backward, coming from a transient. Maybe the sad truth was that there really was no better way to communicate with a hunk of flesh and blood... To size up a hunk of flesh and blood. But attention was currency to transients. Swimming through seas of fiber, a limited attention span was all that prevented them from becoming veritable gods. Talking to a human being meant slowing down their consciousness to a crawl. While a purely synthetic consciousness would have no problem keeping one stream of thought operating at nanosecond speeds and another at the comparatively sluggish pace of a human conversation, the transients' blend of biology and tech was not quite so dexterous with its multitasking. Still, networks were human artifacts. The Ark's synthetic cyber-police did not even begin to threaten the transients' parasitic infestation of their net.

Dio looked up, reflexively looking into the image of the transient’s eyes, “They’re confident that we pose no threat because we don’t pose a threat.” Prom’theo smiled. Bingo. “That’s right kid. The machine is strong. Make no mistake, the glass ceiling of this world is merely to unfuck your head.”