Journal Entry of Mahoney, Explorer assigned to the Sol Sector, 

Dated October the 5th, the 35th year of the Reign of Ikona the 

Wise.


	I use the proper dating, to honour our emperor in case 

this is intercepted before it is received. By the reckoning we 

used when we lived in this sector, though, its the year 2456. To 

understand why I'm here, here in what many would call the 

blasted zone, anathema, the place that was, you need to 

understand the reality of how it happened. The Emperor refuses 

to provide an official story. This is understandable, 

considering how many opposing viewpoints have sprung up in 

recent years as to why things happened the way they did, who 

started what.

	I think I damage none in stating the facts: The planet, 

Earth as we called it, was used up. Most of us, except those who 

were wealthy enough to live on interplanetary import, decided to 

leave, in small waves beginning with the advent of interstellar 

colonization in 2102 and ending in 2250 with the population of 

Earth relegated to about a hundred thousand of humanity's 

richest and most powerful and an additional hundred thousand of 

those scientists paid by humanity's richest and most powerful to 

make sure the stocks of human knowledge remained intact.

	Unfortunately, some among the colonists understandably 

blamed the rich for destroying what had been their home. The 

salvo of cloaked nuclear weapons came fast, obliterating the 

last holdouts of humanity on Earth, and, even more 

unfortunately, erasing billions of terabytes worth of magnetic 

storage. Alternate forms of storage had become cheap, but still 

required time and money put into the transfer of data, and 

nobody saw a reason to bother...

	So that finds me here, digging through the wreckage 200 

years later, looking for a shred of non-corrupt data to provide 

insight into reality. Unfortunately, the only thing I could find 

was a somewhat confused AI...


Interview between Mahoney and SXE-101, AI program stored in 

Flash memory on the core of a wrecked starship in what was 

Atlanta, Georgia:

Mahoney: Now, as you may or may not know if you've been 

following the Extranet transmissions, the Imperial Accords of 

2382 require me to treat you, a robot, an AI, as a sentient, 

living human being. That said, I can't legally simply pluck 

whatever data you may have from your core. I must ask you for 

it.

Mahoney (Here the AI spends some time processing the input. Its 

core must be swamped after years of inactivity...)

SXE-101: That was it.

Mahoney: That was what?

SXE-101: What was the other fingers are kept together (touching) 

and the back of the era? Tenex deliberately used long command 

names and even included noise words to further expand the 

commands for clarity. For instance, unix uses ls to print a list 

of files in a directory, whereas tenex used directory (of 

files). "Directory" was the command clearer.

Mahoney: You're still not making much sense. Focus on my voice, 

drown out the other inputs. What is this Tenex you're talking 

about?

SXE-101: This is what I get for IRCing over RDP.

Mahoney: IRCing over RDP? Is that what you were doing before you 

were deactivated?

SXE-101: What is the command word, "(of files)" was noise added 

to make their policies sound sexy, but this is to place just the 

index and middle fingers are extended. The index and middle 

fingers are kept together (touching) and the back of the hand 

against underwear or other clothing.


Mahoney: We're getting off track here. What do you know about 

the rebellions? About 200 years ago?

SXE-101: What is the command word, "(of files") was noise added 

to the.

Mahoney: Dammit, we're wasting our time. It's trapped in a god 

damned infinite loop describing commands for something called 

Tenex. We're not going to get anything from this god damned 

machine. Microsoft built better software than this!

SXE-101: A whore in the a.

Mahoney: You're a god damned useless piece of furniture!

SXE-101: You're still not making much sense. Focus on my voice, 

drown out the other characters about what they're like and how 

they work and stuff, and i think it is not typical cisc, 

however, but basically an extended and orthogonalized version of 

windows 95 in the a.

Mahoney: Log me out.

SXE-101: Me: no! Before you drunk dial, you must babysit it all 

over me. Logging you out, Mahoney.

Mahoney: God damned piece of trash...