by Thomas Brooks

Created on: May 31, 2009

We are on the verge of an incredible breakthrough. The atmosphere at the computer lab had an air of subdued energy, the personnel shuffled nervously as the Gentronics Mk3 processor continued its task. Professor Richard Balkun paced anxiously, his colleagues monitoring the data stream from the massive project that had occupied the Mk3 for the past six years. The Mk3 was a state of the art wetware computer that made use of organic based processing and neuron encoded memory storage. It was the fastest artificial processing unit ever created by man, with a speed that was a thousand times faster than the human mind. At its creation, it was deemed to be the ultimate in artificial intelligence. As its initial project, it had been given the task of decoding the remaining gene sequences of human DNA, a task that humanity had struggled with during the earlier part of the century.

As the 21st century was drawing to a close, humanity was struggling with much more than studying human DNA. Chaos was more of the norm in society, rather than order. Once great nations were on the edge of collapse. Small border wars ran rampant across each continent, thousands pf people died everyday due to violence. Moral decay and depravity had become pervasive, with human decency and kindness being a rare oddity in society. Across the world, humanity was rapidly descending to the level of dog-eat-dog. Many people across the world knew that something needed to happen; something had to happen that would shock humanity back to its collective senses.

Professor Balkun reflected over the past six years, as the Mk3 had labored over the gargantuan task. There had been a time when most in the scientific community had thought that the Mk3 was a failure like its predecessors. Why was the Mk3 taking so long? or Shouldn't the Mk3 have been able to break the code a long time ago? were just some of the comments that had plagued the operation. Balkun reflected on the period of time when the Mk3 seemed to have been nearly dormant, using very minimal amounts of processing, seeming to struggle with the enormous amounts of data.

That had changed suddenly six months ago when the Mk3 began operating at full capacity; processing speeds had remained at one hundred percent as it had reached the last twelve strands of code to be deciphered. When the Mk3 would communicate with its programmers, it simply stated that results will be given at the end of the processing cycle. It had been, at times, a frustrating task

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