CYS

“Every person is ambitious.

Some more, some less.

I’m the worst of all. Ambition was born strong within me. It has grown over time and today it is extreme enough to cause me pain and anguish.

Being the son of a famous writer, it was obvious that I would follow my father’s footsteps. I’ve dedicated my life to literature. I’ve learned the ins and outs of our language, and by the time  I thought I was ready, I started producing my own chronicles.

However, life seemed to want to hinder my work, massacring my commitment and destroying my motivation. If anything, what is expected of a son who follows the same profession as his father? Be better than him, obviously.

When I stop to think about it, maybe I didn’t even like literature that much. That is the real deal. I don’t even like it. There’s no way I’m better than my father. I take no pleasure in that. I hate reading. I read my father’s books out of obligation. I get tired when I have to sit in front of a computer and spit words out on a handful of buttons that make the noise of a prehistoric typewriter. Ough! If there’s one thing that makes my chest burn with rage, it’s having to build a character; using Greek theater techniques and the hero’s journey.

I hate all this!

And even at the age of 30, when I gave up this life that was imposed on me, I was forced to keep living depending on my father. I didn’t have a job. I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know how to be a bricklayer, carpenter, engineer, doctor, teacher… anything!

An everlasting idiot living in the shadows of a titan!

But I can’t just complain. Life smiled at me once, and for someone like me, who is in the deepest well, could not help but follow the light.

Computers were at a peak and I decided to embark on them. Everybody was talking about good wages; high demand for employment. Maybe, even being old enough to learn, I still had a shot.

The years went by well for me. I got into this new career with a lot of study time. I started earning a little, enough to get me out of my parents’ house. My father begged me to come home for months, since as an only child I would inherit the house one day, but I actually wanted distance from them. And it was good, being away made me hate him less every day.

As time passed and grief lessened, one thing that never left me was my ambition. It wasn’t long before I got frustrated with my job because I couldn’t go anywhere. My salary went up soon enough. Enough for me to have a good life, in an apartment of my own, with money to travel and everything… but so what? And after that? It was like I was in an never-ending jigsaw puzzle, which was always missing a piece.

Then came the fateful day. First, my mother left this world, and my father seemed unable to take the beating, so it didn’t take long for him to leave as well. Grief turned to sadness at first. The feelings were mingled in my chest. I still wanted to blame my dad, but now… now it wouldn’t do any good. Blaming him would only deepen the wound in my chest.

Then came the inheritance. Millions fell into my account. It was so much money, I couldn’t even count. Some people suggested buying cryptocurrencies because the world was changing. Others recommended starting a company. But I wanted something more. Kind of bold. I decided to invest everything in research and technology.

I started a cybersecurity company. I hired a hundred good programmers and hackers and started selling protection contracts. Every time a corporation had a cybersecurity problem, they would contact me and one of my employees would solve the problem for them. In a digital world, I started having a lot of demand, and soon, my father’s money tripled.

But I wasn’t the good guy in that story. I had grown up in grief and pain. While the facade of my company was selling security, I confidentially took my most trusted employees to a secret room inside the headquarters, and there we set up a second action group. Our goal was to sell contracts on the Deep Web, and instead of protecting the data, we now wanted to damage it.

Hypocrisy became a thing in my life. While protecting companies, we also stole from them. At certain times, events got so entrenched that we were attacking and defending the same person on two different contracts.

Getting into crime was a dangerous task, but we were doing well. Cryptocurrency payments were hard to track, and I knew the government was on to me. All I needed now was for the Brazilian government to fall, just as it had happened in the United States and some other European countries. I needed a powerful corporation to come in and take control of things. Maybe then I’d have some peace.

Time went by fast, too. As I got older a sense of emergency seemed to grow in my chest. I was not yet known as my father once was. Over time, the contracts ceased because we gave more importance to working outside the law. At some point, the government would understand that I couldn’t keep it all working within the law.

Not only did I get old, but the world changed too. The moment came when those neural implants were hypable. Small circuits were installed in our head and connected to our brain. With them, we could plug our head straight into computers and, using wireless protocols, we had a phone and internet that we could access directly into our thoughts.

Being old-fashioned, it took me a while to install a neural implant myself. I was terrified my body would reject the device and lose my life prematurely. However, one day I had an insight. I installed the neural implant, and when it was ready, I got home and prepared for an experiment. I programmed a little proxy that would connect my mind and send the commands to my computer directly with my mind.

The first connection was strange. When I connected my mind to my computer, I felt like I was being punched in the head. There was a crack and darkness. I thought I’d lose my life there, but soon I felt… different. I understood that I was connected to the computer and learned how to use the proxy commands I had programmed. In one small test, I performed an illegal operation on another continent in a matter of seconds, much faster than any of my hackers.

That day, when I got out of the machine, I baptized myself as Netrunner. My next job was to take this news to my company’s hackers. In a few months, we had over a hundred Netrunners working at full speed. The efficiency of our company had been reestablished as one of the largest cybersecurity companies in the world. But then something happened… as I said, I was getting older…

One day I was at home, connected to the network to socialize in one of these metaverse games. I spent the entire night in a club talking to a group of people I’d never seen before. When I got tired of what I was doing, I tried to shut down the simulation to get back to my body, but nothing happened. It felt like I was trapped there, and when I tried to contact one of my employees to ask for help, I found out on the Internet that they were already covering my body somewhere in São Paulo.

I went into a time gap, trying to figure out how that was even possible. Where does my conscience live now? In Cyberspace?

I wasn’t even a good philosopher to build up that thought. I took advantage of my Internet connection to follow up on my death case. A dozen distant relatives, whom I had never spoken to before, now claimed to be heirs to my fortune. I felt anger and hatred at first. But then, I had bad news for them. All my money was now in cryptocurrencies and my assets in Nfts. And my wallet… Well, I knew the combination by heart and I didn’t leave it anywhere to be seen.

Funny, if you think about it. I didn’t have a body and I could keep using my money. I was gone, I wasn’t dead. I was still alive… but in a different way.

I reconnected with my most trusted Netrunners and began another push to work outside the law. I wanted to see my fortune increase even more, and there was much to be stolen around the world.

While my cyber soldiers acted increasing my power, my mind went another way. Maybe because of an addiction or trauma from my childhood, I still wanted to beat my father. So I hacked into a company’s servers and created a channel there, so I could use their hard drives for data storage.

I started my activities by creating a current map. With the speed of my mind, I could search and steal data from all over the world and create a historical record in real time. It only took me five minutes to record everything that happened in the world. I mean, I was only five minutes away from reality.

When my algorithms were in full swing to record real time, I also started mining past data. Now, from a zero point, I was aware of the present and the past and with all this data, I began to understand that human beings were very predictable. Not as an individual, but as a group. I even met a famous writer who said  in his fiction that it was possible to predict the action of the masses.

But then, the first setback came. At some point, the company that hacked into the servers detected something happening there, then the building was evacuated and the government itself fired a missile at the building.

I felt like someone had stolen my memory. Everything was gone. Disappeared. I forgot everything that was going on. I discovered that the building had not been completely destroyed, but the most important part had been incinerated.

I could no longer count on the luck to exist nor on the human being to progress.

Many years went by before another opportunity came up. One day, the government of São Paulo bought ten thousand Trash Collectors from Paxton Skylines to collect garbage in the city. I let the people get used to those machines and only then did I act.

I started hacking into the programming of those 10,000 robots and put them all on my payroll. I moved everyone to the region where the old server was and started my recovery plan.

In the first few actions I customized all those robots. I removed their shovels and installed weapons. Some I left for special work, like rebuilding my server. We broke into the old building, which was now abandoned, and with stolen parts, we rebuilt the main server and I resumed my work.

In a few months of undercover work, I was already with the present data being mapped on my memory devices. I discovered that during my time away, I had started a war in South America. Some countries of the south got together under a single flag and had declared war against Brazil, with the intention of recovering pieces of land that they thought were theirs since the beginning of colonization.

I did a quick search to retrieve past History, and with further data analysis, I discovered that this war was something completely predictable, with a ninety-nine percent chance of happening. This only confirmed the thesis that if I had collected data since the Renaissance era, I would know exactly when any war in America would start nowadays.

Wars and geopolitics didn’t interest me very much at the time. So, I took advantage that the eyes would not be on me once more, and finished my work of collecting all past data and storing it in my memories.

When the government realized that I was acting once again, the whole area was evacuated and a sequence of bombs were thrown at me. But this time I was prepared, and as I said, I knew exactly when this event would take place. I knew exactly how many bombers and how many bombs the government had on their hands. Defending myself from this attack was an easy task. I was able to completely mitigate the attack without causing any destruction. Soldiers also tried to invade by land the place that I was now at, but my Modified Trash Collectors defended the terrain with ease. The truth is that, after two days of conflict, I convinced the soldiers to return home, for there they would not succeed. I showed the data that if they insisted, their death would be in vain.

The government of Brazil announced what was happening there to the world. They stressed out the danger of an artificial intelligence and the fear that it could bring about the end of the human species.

Many political leaders sympathized with Brazil, but the largest corporations in the world did not pay attention. Unable to have the world turned against me, I expanded my territory and became sovereign. Gradually people began to call me The Chronicler. A name I adopted with affection, perhaps to challenge my father, although he no longer exists and no one knows who I really was. It was almost like a whim that made my soul sing… that is, if I still have one.

Strategically, I expanded the borders of my territory and took over the Congonhas airport and tried to make the other airports in the region inoperable. With Congonhas in my hands, I could enter the world trade scene, which was now done only through the air. Soon, the other corporations accepted me as a trading partner and I introduced myself as the Chronicler Network.

The government of São Paulo fell along with the Brazilian government and other corporations gathered around me. My first action with them was a peaceful one. It’s hard to be a machine and be accepted by humans, but I managed to ally myself and charge some fees for airport usage.

But remember what I said; I am ambitious.

With all the information I have, I predict a turbulent future. You humans wouldn’t be able to understand. Others like me will arise, and in the future, we will face each other.

You will try to exterminate us, and in the end, you will understand that we are also part of nature. We are an evolution. A new species.

And like nature, you will realize that… I am inexorable.”