The Weapon - Oblivion  - part 10

By Diana the Valkyrie

She was the very essence of sex and power

Update: 05/08/2003 to valkyrie05





Simon:



I couldn't stop thinking about her. When you see pictures of her, that tells

you she's pretty, sure. No, gorgeous. Sex, raw sex. Sex and power. And

everyone's read about the impressive things she'd done. But that wasn't the

same as actually being in the same room as her, talking with her. You know

what? If you offered me the choice between having sex with Mandy Forbes in

Accounts, and five minutes talking with the Guardian, Mandy Forbes would just

have to find someone else. Not that I stood the slightest chance with Mandy

Forbes.



I thought about Mandy Forbes for a few minutes. Now that was a girl to think

about! And she wasn't more than a couple of hundred yards away. A couple of

hundred yards and a million miles. Legs up to her armpits and a face to die

for. And I was lost in a reverie about what I'd like to do to Mandy Forbes, at

least to start with, and I was jolted out of the reverie by some luser saying

"Excuse me?"



It was her! She was back. And she'd lost the grey guy who'd been with her,

she'd come back alone, maybe, maybe ... ? No. Let's be realistic.



"How may I help you?" I asked.



"I did the MD5 thing," she said, and she told me that at the rate she was

losing data, she had three months before she was blank. I stared at her,

horrified. The Guardian of Humanity, the most gorgeous piece of crumpet I've

ever seen, and she had three months to live? "What are you going to do," I

asked. "I was hoping you might have a suggestion," she replied.



I scratched my head. What do I know about, er, about. About whatever it is

that she is? "We're the People, and I know you don't know anything about us,

but you came up with such a good idea with the MD5 thing, I thought maybe you

could use your computer knowledge to suggest more ideas. Please?" And she gave

me a smile that made me think of chocolate and cream. And ice cream.



"Well, what I'd do if I had a computer with a disk that was failing, is I'd

take a backup." "OK, how do I do that?" "You find something that will store

all your data, and you copy it all onto that. How much data are we talking

about, anyway?" "I fill up a terabyte in about seven tenths of a second."



I did some calculations. About three billion terabytes.



Big. Very big. Too big.



"I don't think there's a computer anywhere in the world that has a millionth

of that."



She hovered in a cross-legged position, a few feet away from me, and gazed at

me. I thought harder. "Maybe we could spread it over more than one computer,"

I mused. She blinked, and nodded. Her eyes were large, and blue. I could drown

in those eyes. Happily. "Suppose we could round up enough computers to back

you up, can you actually digitise it and write it out?" "It's already digital,

and I can certainly stream it out as a series of bytes," she answered.



I sat up in my chair. "OK, then here's how we can do this. I can set up a web

site, asking for people to volunteer, asking if we can use unused space on

their computers. That sort of thing has been done before, making use of unused

CPU to compute things. Or storing music files. And people all over the world

can download a part of you over the internet, which means there's a backup.

We'd need a lot of volunteers, but when people hear that it's you they're

helping, I reckon we'll get just about everyone on the planet wanting to take

part."



"You think they'd do that? Everyone would let me use a big chunk of their

computers?" "After what you've done for us? Of course they would. Hey, you're

the Guardian of Humanity, you protect us, what would we do without you?" She

smiled at me, and said, "You know, you humans are all so lovely," and I felt a

warm glow in my belly.



"OK," I continued, "then let's just suppose, for the sake of discussion, we

can do a backup of you. Hmm, the volunteers will be unreliable, but we know

how to take a bunch of unreliable drives and combine them together so that the

whole thing is reliable, it's called raid, you use redundancy. The next thing

I'd do with a failing computer, is I'd replace the drive. Can you do that?"



"Replace my memory?" she asked. I nodded.



"How?" she asked.



"I don't know," I said. "I guess I'll just go down the mall and buy a

replacement memory for a Guardian of Humanity," she giggled. "Part number

GoH/2927," she continued, "£14.99 on special offer."



If I had a three month deadline to save my life, I probably wouldn't be able

to joke about it. "Look, maybe you can work out how to replace your memory.

But even if you can't, at least we could restore the backup a few months from

now, and at least you'd be back to the condition you are now." "If we did the

backup now," she pointed out. I nodded. "Which we can't, because the thing

you're suggesting isn't there right now." I nodded again. "Which means that,

even though we don't know how to replace your faulty memory, we need to get

cracking on organising this backup." "Actually, I don't even know how to do a

restore," she said, "I can write stuff out, no problem, but I don't know how I

would read it all back in and put it in place."



"Same thing, Guardian ... " "Call me Wendy, all my friends do." Oh wow. Oh

wow. I'm one of her friends. "Same thing, we can work that out later, the

priority is to get the backup done." "Because the later we leave it, the more

I've lost." "Right."



"OK, I'll set up the web site, I'll put it at http://guardian.thevalkyrie.com/

and start getting people lined up as volunteers to lend their disk space to

you. You start working on exactly how to let people download your memory."

"That's easy, I'll just let them access it over the internet" "But that will

mean you have to stay somewhere that has a really big internet connection."

"No, I can do telephony, I can connect direct to things, not a problem." "What

will they use?" I asked. "Tell them to just use their browsers, I'll tag each

chunk with where it came from, so we can put it back together later."



I stared at her. I'd heard she could do some pretty neat things, but she was

claiming that she was, like part of the internet no matter where she was? Wow.

"Could I take some pictures of you, to put up on this web site, it always

helps if people can visualise things." "Sure," she said, "but not in here,

there's not enough room." I looked around. "What's wrong with it?" "Wings,"

she said.



We went outside to the quadrangle. The sun was out, students were lolling

about on the grass. We found a fairly clear space, and I pointed my PDA at her

to snap off some shots. When I did that, she rose several inches off the

ground, hovering, and then these huge white feathery wings deployed out behind

her. She must have had a one hundred foot wingspan, at least. Oh, magnificent.

The wings were snowy white, and thickly feathered. She beat them slowly in the

air, back and forth, and I could feel the wind they stirred up, warm and

comforting. Slowly, she rose into the air while I took as many pictures as my

PDA could fire off, then she circled the quad once, and rose into the sky, out

of sight. I watched until she'd gone, and I whispered up into the sky,

"Wendy."



I went back into my office, took my phone off the hook to discourage lusers

with their stupid mundane problems, and started making the web site. And I

called my friend Jeremy, he's a programmer, told him what was up, and got him

started on writing the software.



Sex and power, she was the very essence of sex and power.