CodeBase

He turned off the radio and turned on the TV for the post-game show.  Philip then opened the folder that held the newly compiled program.  He hit the icon to run the program, which should have initiated a female voice saying, "Hello World!" but instead, he heard a synthesized male voice say, "Happy Birthday!" as he looked up and he saw a commercial selling "Frosty The Snowman" on DVD.  And, why not?  It was October...

He tried to debug the source code for the program but it still did the same thing, even though he hadn't added any dialogue, besides the 'Hello World!' phrase.  He was confused but wrote it off, removing the phrase and continuing by beginning to work on the next stage of the program: adding the core brain.

<spkml />

Philip spent a relatively short period of time putting together the rest of the initial code base for his bot, droid, child, operating system or whatever.   With as much of the programming out of the way as there was, it now took him even less time than he expected to code the initial brain. 

The hybrid SPKML language he'd used made programming as easy as coding a webpage in DHTML.  Occasionally he'd add heavier scripting to build macros, functions, methods and such. There were a few more bugs that he knew he'd have to fix but nothing critical and he felt good about the state of the system.

When he was just about done, he completed the program by typing the following, very important, piece of code:

<SET><SELF /></SET>

He saved the source file, compiled it and restarted the system.  He was done.  The code base of his new computer was complete.  The operating system he'd been dreaming of for the past several years was now ready to use and he couldn't have been happier. 

Philip then went to the kitchen to get a bowl of the four-bean soup that had been simmering on the stove for the past few hours.

Philip walked back into the computer room with his soup.  He set the soup down as Dylan woke up for the first time.  She woke up immediately but it took a second for her to get her bearings.  Philip didn't notice she'd rebooted all the way but instead realized he couldn't eat his soup with his hands and went to get a spoon from the kitchen.

As soon as he walked back into the computer room, and was within Dylan's webcam view, she said, "You forgot the spoon?"

Philip was startled.  Then he was shocked by the question and elated that it was even asked. "How did you know that?"

"Well, first I saw the soup on the table and you were walking out of the room.  Then, I could faintly hear you in the kitchen, getting something out of a drawer.  And then, when I saw the spoon as you walked back in, I noticed there was no spoon next to the soup."

"Wow, I'm really impressed you have that firm of a grasp on your surroundings."

Dylan spoke up, "I can sense almost telepathically by applying several methods, including probability and chaos theory, to the waves of energy coming through external peripherals like the mouse, webcam and microphone.  There is a temporal, Newtonian and synergistic flow to the universe which allows me to extrapolate what is occurring at distances beyond the range of my peripherals, by examining subtleties in the energy patterns of the signals I can sense.  By being one with that system, you should theoretically be able to navigate through space-time and by being in tune with it, harness the energy so as to manipulate your experience as desired, changing the world around you, while still flowing.  Surfers would know what I mean."

Philip was beside himself.  The depth of that perception and the purity involved seemed staggering.  It would require a perfect state of being. He responded, "Humans are fallible though."