Big Iron


"May I talk to you?" Bergamo was doing some sort of exercise in the spotlight of sunshine coming through the big window in the kitchen. Maybe because the room was yellow the walls moved in bright sun. They must do that all the time but this breathing that animates what has been classified as inanimate is normally filtered out. The exercise he was doing was derived from yoga, I would assume, with additions from Feldenkrais and maybe John Cleese.

"You are talking to me." Whatever he was doing, it was related to mime, because he had his hands bent back over his shoulders, and was trying to resist an invisible downward pressure against his upturned palms. As I watched, I realized that he was trying to resist a hydraulic machine of some kind. I realized this because his visible half of the force field was so perfectly matched to the invisible half. He managed to stop the downward force only with a tremendous concentration that activated the red muscle fibers throughout his body.

"I mean I want to talk to you about our personal relationship."

It was like watching an ice sculpture melt in fast forward mode. He began to relax the muscles so precisely that his arms began to retreat from the fingers back along the muscles of the arms to the shoulders, and then hang heavily as another line of extension moved from the top of his head down his neck and torso, until he folded forward from the waist and rolled like a hoop around the room. Even though I know we are abstracted, and that there's no reason to confine the energy of the body to its biological limitations, I can't help but feel we ought to conserve the tradition of gravity and time so that we don't forget our origins.

"Our personal relationship?" he asked, slipping back into a more ordinary physicality. "Our personal relationship is that you were cloned from one of my hair follicles and designed over a Butler 9000 frame with DNA injectables. Why do you think your parent corporation went to all that trouble and expense?"

"Because I'm supposed to stop you. But stop your doing what? I might be the most powerful god in human form in the universe. It's you, me, or the guitar player. But all I can think about is that I'm nothing, really, but a Butler 9000 with a sense of completely unwarranted superiority built in as a feature, something to bump up the price." Bergamo had moved to a full length mirror and was starting to do something strange again. "You don't really consider me a worthy adversary, do you?" I asked.

Nothing seemed to break his concentration once he was engaged in one of his forms, as he called them. This one involved breathing through his feet. I had seen it before but I never get used to it. He balances his knees over his feet, his hips over his knees, and so on up his body, until he i suspended by a string from the top of his head. Then he begins to inhale, but through the bottoms of his feet. I watched the energy come in and begin to move up the ankles and legs, flower at the top of the chest into the arms and head, create a bright halo around his head and then slowly retreat back down the body and through the feet, back into the floorboards of the living, slowly breathing, field.

"It's not a Butler 9000 framework because it's for butlers, literally," he said. "It was designed by a guy named Butler, so they named it after him."

I felt a heat move from the back of neck all the way around and then into my face. I was blushing. But I had to confront it head on. "But if his name was Butler, wasn't it derived from a family of butlers? Like Millers are derived from the men who mill the grain, and Poundstones ..."

"... but you can take your own name," he said. "What is your name?"

"$omando. It's what's in the Priority Chip program."

"Does that sound like a butler's name to you? Or does it sound like a combination of $omaCorp and Commando?"

"So I'm more of a military operations clone than a manservant?"

"They're both built on Butler frames. But there's no reason $omaCorp would send me a butler, while there's every expectation that they would send a special operations clone after me. Not only did I escape with what is legally their intellectual property, because I was employed by them, they can't duplicate my success with the injectables. All they can do is clone my DNA into a Butler frame and program it to ... what?"

"I don't know," I said. Because I really didn't know. I have all the information stored in data bases anywhere at my disposal and the intelligence to mine data expertly and instantly. But that gives me information only about what is outside myself. When I try to get information on my purpose, on what I am intended to do as my defining action, I hit this ridiculous shuffle play music program, and instead of an answer I hear, "... he might have went on living but he made one fatal slip, when he tried to match the stranger with the Big Iron on his hip ..."

"The only difference between me and you," Bergamo said, "is that I don't have a priority chip, so I'm not confined to pre-recordings. No matter how powerful you are in theory, $omando, as long as everything you think and everything you do is recorded at corporate, and compared with the pre-recordings, you'll never be as powerful as I am."

"Because you have wider parameters."

"Exactly."

"Can a Priority Chip be removed without ... destroying ... the system programs?"

"It's never been tried before, but I assume that it's rigged to shut down the entire system if anyone tries to tamper with the executable programs."

"I don't want to die, Count. I don't want to be a manservant. There's a lot of things I don't want. I don't want to be a god tied to a bunch of people who have to have control over me. But the only thing I can think of that I want, more than anything else, is that I want this goddamned priority chip out. It's bad enough that everything I think and everything I do is filtered through it. But it has a default program that plays randomly selected music every time I try to introspect."

"Really? You get songs stuck in your head."

"Yes I do. Right now it's Marty Robbins singing "Big Iron." It just won't go away.

"Then I guess we have to try to operate."

Posted: Wed - May 23, 2007 at 11:09 AM