His own lover, Zameen, the legendary beauty of the Rijk and the only scientist whom Kronos regarded as his peer, refused to accompany him to his new antipodean world. Her place was with her people, she said, and she would die with them if that was what destiny decreed. Akasz Kronos abandoned her without a second thought, perhaps preferring the sexual multiplicity available on the other side of the world.
The broken strings in the Kronos portrait are purely metaphorical. The Professor’s artificial life-forms were string-free from the start. They walked and talked: they had stomachs.” sophisticated fueling centers that could process ordinary food and drink, with solar-cell backupsystems that enabled them to stay alert, and work, for longer hours than any flesh-and-blood human being. They were faster, stronger, smarter—“better,” Kronos told them—than their human, antpodean hosts. “You are kings and queens,” he taught his creatures. “Carry yourselves well. You are the masters now.” He even gave them the power to reproduce themselves. Each cyborg was given his or her own blueprint so that it could, in theory, endlessly re-create itself in its own image. But in the master program Kronos added a Prime Directive: whatever order he gave, the cyborgs and their replicas were obliged to obey, even to the point of acquiescing in their own destruction. should he deem that necessary. He dressed them in finery and gave them the illusion of freedom, but they were his slaves. He gave them no names. There were seven-digit numbers branded on their wrists, and they were known by these.
No two Kronosian creations were the same. Each was given its own sharply delineated personality traits: the Aristocratic Philosopher:the Promiscuous Child-Woman:the First Rich Ex—Wife (a Bitch):the Aging Groupie: the Pope’sDriver:the Underwater Plumber: the Traumatized Quarterback: the Blackballed Golfer: the Three Society Girls: the Playboys: the Golden Child and His Ideal Mother:the Deceitful Publisher: the Angry Professor: the Goddess of Victory (an exceptionally beautiful cyborg modeled after Kronos’s abandoned lover. Zameen of Rijk): the Runners:the Cell-Phone Woman: the Cell-Phone Man:the Human Spiders: the Woman Who Saw Visions: the Astro-Adman; even a Dollmaker. And as well as characters, strengths, weaknesses, habits, memories, allergies, lusts—he gave them a value system by which to live. The greatness of Akasz Kronos, which was also his downfall, may be judged by this: that the virtues and vices he inculcated in his creations were not wholly, or not only, his own. Self-serving, opportunistic, unscrupulous, he nevertheless permitted his cybernetic life-forms a degree of ethical independence. The possibility of idealism was allowed.
Lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, consistency: these were the six high Kronosian values, but instead of embedding single definitions of these principles in the cyborgs’ default programs, he offered his creations a series of multiple-choice options. Thus lightness might be defined as “doing lightly what is in reality a heavy duty,” that is to say, grace: but it might also be “treating frivolously what is serious,” or even “making light of what is grave. that is, amorality. And quickness could be “doing swiftly whatever is necessary,” in other words, efficiency: however, if the emphasis were to be placed on the second part of that phrase, a kind of ruthlessness could result. Exactitude could tend toward “precision or “tyranny.” “visibility” might be “clarity of action” or “attention-seeking.” Multiplicity was capable of being both open-mindedness” and “duplicity.” and “consistency, “the most important of the six, could mean either “trustworthiness” or “obsessiveness”—the consistency of—we may use our own world’s models here, for the sake of easy comparison—Bardeby the Scrivener, who preferred not to, or of Michael Kohlhaas, with his inexorable and world-shattering search for redress. Sancho Panza is consistent in the reliable sense of the word, but so, contrariwise, is erratic, fixated, chivalry-maddened Quixote. And note, too, the tragic consistency of the Land Surveyor, eternally yearning toward what he can never attain, or of Ahab in his pursuit of the whale. This is the consistency that destroys the consistent; for the Ahabs perish. while the inconsistent, the Ishmaels, survive. “The fullness of a living self is inexpressible, obscure,” Kronos told his mechanical fictions. “In that mystery is freedom, which is what I have given you. In that obscurity is light.”
Why did he permit the Puppet Kings such psychological and moral liberty? Perhaps because the scientist and scholar in him could not resist seeing how these new life-forms resolved the battle that rages within all sentient creatures, between light and dark, heart and mind, spirit and machine.
At first the Puppet Kings served Kronos well. They made the shoes that paid for the land leases, tended the livestock. and tilled the soil. He had dressed them all in court finery, but their long brocaded skirts and dress uniforms quickly grew soiled and torn, and they made themselves new clothes more suited to their labors. As the ice-caps continued to melt and the water levels rose, they prepared to defend their shrinking new home against the foretold Rilkattack. By now they had learned how to modify their own systems without Kronos’s help, and they added new skills and aptitudes by the day. One such innovation enabled them to use the local firewater as flying fuel. Carrying bottles of the toddy with them in case they wanted topping up, the cyborg air force took flight without any need for airplanes, and caught and destroyed the incoming Rijk craft in spydernets. the giant booby-trapped metal webs that they hung across the sky. Underwater, too, they laid similar spidery traps (they had modified their “lungs” for submarine use and were therefore able to sabotage and scuttle the entire Rijk fleet from below). The so-called Battle of the Antipodes was won, and the skies and seas fell silent. On the far side of Galileo—I, floodwaters engulfed the Rijk. If Akasz Kronos felt any compassion as his countrymen drowned, he did not record it.
After the victory, however, things changed. The Puppet Kings returned from the wars with a new sense of individual worth, even of “rights.” To bring them into line, Kronos announced an urgent maintenance-and-repair schedule. Many cyborgs failed to keep their appointments at his workshop, preferring—in the case of those damaged in battle—to live with their disabilities: their malfunctioning servo-mechanisms and partially burned-out circuitry. Groups of the Puppet Kings became secretive, conspiratorial, surly. Kronos suspected that they were meeting covertly to plot against him and heard rumors that at these meetings they addressed one another not by number but by new names, which they had chosen for themselves. He became tyrannical, and when one of the Three Society Girls was insolent to his face, he made an example of her, turning against her his much feared master blaster,’ which caused an instant, irreversible deletion of all programs: in other words, cybernetic death.
The execution was counterproductive. Dissension grew more rapidly than before. Many cyborgs went underground, erecting, around their hideouts, sophisticated anti-surveillance electronic shields, which even Kronos could not easily penetrate, and moving frequently, so that by the time the Professor had broken down one set of defenses, the revolutionaries had already disappeared behind the next. We cannot say for sure exactly when the Dollmaker, whom Akasz Kronos had created in his own image and imbued with many of his own characteristics, learned how to override the Prime Directive. But soon after that breakthrough it was Professor Akasz Kronos who disappeared. No longer safe from his creations, he had to go underground while the Peekay revolution triumphantly emerged into the daylight to be greeted by the cheers of all the cyborgs in Baburia.