Dante's Handcart

Angelzero

Recently various sources reported a German man who turned himself in to authorities after an email virus persuaded him that his child-porn surfing had been monitored by the FBI. That started me thinking about the power of belief and the potential for manipulating that faith, with a certain tech-twist of course. Thinking turned itself into the faint rumblings of a short story.


You wanna see big belief? You gotta go small. Yeah, real big belief, real tiny small. Folks don't get that, much.
People assume that stuff like cells and microchips don't have souls. But a chip, a chip has belief, a belief stronger than any fundamentalist preacher. It believes in binary, in the purity of the ones and the zeroes. In the truth that one is always one and that zero is always zero.
Now bumping up against a firewall the other day it turns me down. So I slide out an angelzero, a little prophet who can turn black into white, make that closed-door 1 turn welcome-home 0. Something superspecial cooked up by my pal Grove in among his laptops and his ashtrays. Grove is my investment in genius, my fixit man. Clever little bastard, like all those 100%-proof databrains are.
Anyhows, sweet pretty little angelzero flaps its wings and bats its eyes, gets to what it does best which is a-sermonising and a-lecturing. Hella beguiling to the digitally devout, and you show me which chip isn't. Starts with the "wolves in sheeps' clothing" crud, drops a few subtle false zero hints, really lays it on thick. Mister firewall gets to doubting himself, doubting dogma writ holy since silicon slice. It ain't easy to get with the program when angelzero's crooning creedcode, believe you me!
That chip is a goner, friend, and that firewall comes tumbling down. Some people say that the online world ain't a place for religion, but you & I both know that belief ain't going anywhere, long as they keep churning out the chips with cast-iron conviction. Amen to that.

posted by Chris @ 11:02 pm