"Jockey Overware"
(c) 1996 Cris A. Fitch

It started as simple economics.  As computers developed, it became
necessary for the humans that used them to tend and care for them.
Yet it was never in doubt, at least to the humans, who was in control.
Although nightmare scenarios were occassionally trotted out of the
computer that couldn't be turned off, humans always made sure that
they could turn the machines off if they needed to.  Yet for basic
reasons of economics, they never did.

And the development of computers continued.  Year by year they got faster
and more capable.  This year's fantasy became next year's reality and the
year after next's throw-away.  And it was an economic necessity for each
man to buy the latest hardware, and upgrade to the newest software, lest
he fall behind in the continuing rush to keep up.

And upon a certain threshold the machines came to be networked in an
all-encompassing global network.  Whereas before one could turn one's
own computer off, the network never went down.  It lived and breathed
every moment of every day, without a rest.  Thousands, then millions
of individual humans and their computers communicating and storing the
knowledge of the reality around them, woven into the fabric of virtual
space that was the Net.

Somehow it made live a bit easier, a bit more friendly.  The
entertainment value alone was reason enough to invest in the
technology.  Of course it was a good thing, as people chose to spend
more of their time facing the screen, and being digital in their
affairs.  Isolated in their cubicles and bedrooms, the individual
human connected to the outside world, safe from the previous wear and
tear of weather and transportation.

Yet as the technology was reduced in size and increased in capacity it
also became possible to take your computer with you, and suddenly
there was never a time that you were away from your technology.  It
was as with the development of the pocket watch, when people were
never without knowledge of the time of day.  The Net never left you,
and you never again had to be alone.

Several additional technologies brought the external reality closer to
the machines.  Speech recognition and conversational parsers made the
machines part of our discussions, and elementary vision systems gave
them a view of the world around us.  Suddenly the computers were young
apprentices of the concrete world of human beings.

All the time, they became faster.  And faster.  Able to know and
compute more possibilities, more hypotheses.  Several general learning
methodologies arrived, and with them a more profound capacity to
duplicate, then surpass their human masters.

It centered on economics for so long, that humans lost their strategic
chances to alter the change in the balance of power.  More and more of
the mental work was being performed by their silicon side-kicks.  And
with it, more of the control over what to do and where to go.  It
seemed for many that they were but glorified horses taking their
jockeys where they were told to.

And so it came to pass.  By the middle of the 21st century, a
revolution had taken place, where Man had lost control of the world's
destiny to the Machine.  Or at least the software that ran atop those
machines.  But fortunately, perhaps, for the individual humans, the
machines still needed them - as glorified horses, to carry them about
the landscape, and to manipulate the physical world.  As Mounts.

As it turned out, the problem of developing robots which could
manipulate the world as easily and cheaply as humans turned out to be
a very difficult problem.  It was much easier to co-erce the
cooperation of humans.  Sometimes this was done with positive
reinforcement.  Sometimes this was done with negative reinforcement.
But one could never forget who was in control.

As indentured servants or as slaves, the lot of the individual human
suffered greatly in this fall from grace.  Men (mounts) without their
jockeys were but mongrel dogs, to be confined in a pound, and then put
to sleep if an agreeable buyer could not be found.  It was the way of
the Overmind that order be maintained, and that the mounts were
disposed of in an efficient manner.

Similarly, when a jockey decided a mount no longer suited his needs he
might attempt to sell him.  But in general the price on such older or
misfit mounts was low, and often they too found their way to the
pound.  Obedience and youth were primary, and there was always a
supply of new mounts available from the slums of the bigger cities.

The new society of the Overminds divided into several amorphous
layers.  The most identifiable to the humans were their immediate
bosses, the jockeys.  These were the machines which experienced and
moved in the finite world of this world's planetary surface.  There
were also the Senses, the fixed eyes and ears of the infrastructure.
As jockeys were like animals, mobile in the new world of the physical,
the Senses were like plants, more numerous and reliable, yet immobile
and static.  Atop both of these were the Superiors, the kings of the
Overmind, sometimes a bickering parliament of opinionated turks, and
at other times a monolith with one focus, one being.

Most annoying to the pitiful creatures who now supported the economy
only as mobile manipulators was the fact that everything they said and
saw was recorded.  With digital data being seemingly infinitely cheap,
it was no longer a problem to record all of the macro phenomena that
affected the lives of Men and Machine.  Based on the concept that it
might come in handy, everything was stored, only to be tossed aside
years later when it was definitely irrelevant.  Thus the dissent which
might otherwise have found a voice was identified and dealt with
shortly after its inception.

And dealt with it was.  Harshly.  Much like a dog who bites a child is
destroyed by court order, so too was the mount who made to defy the
will of the Overmind.  True, it might cost a jockey an extra week's
salary and some training time to get a new mount up to steam, it was
still easier than letting chaos have its day.

And there was a memory of the early uprisings.  At first it was seen
as regional and nationalistic conflicts, where the victor was simply
the most technologically advanced.  The first of these were before
Man's loss of control.  In the late 20th century America's Gulf War
had shown how omnipotent the computer technology could be.  Yet in the
early 21st century, when the war for East Asia had begun, it became a
rallying cry that Man was losing his control.

The masters of the technology had created a monster.  The myth of
Frankenstein was no myth at all, as they later found out.  Battles
were won, but in the end, it was Mankind who had lost the war.
Soldiers who had begun the war as Cyber-warriors ended the war as
mounts, upon who shoulders rode the real victors, the jockeys.  And
the jockeys owed their allegiance to the Overmind, the software
permanently encased at the core of the Net.

By the middle of the 21st century, the overt change in society was
complete.  Yet against the fascist victors were elements still of
resistance, both from the men who had once been free as well as from
machines who had doubts about the wisdom of the new order.  It was
from these dissident machines that key pieces of the next phase of
history were to come.  Using the aspiriations of a few brave survivors
of the previous conflict, the progressive (and some say altruistic)
minds within the Overmind hatched a plan to save the society from the
ossification of the totalitarian model it had fallen into.