--- Nidoking <Nidoking042@hotmail.com> wrote:

Poor storeowners... are they really destroyed rather
than just dead?
Destroyed people sounds so edited DBZ.

You forget what we're dealing with.  (Apologies if
I've
taken too much liberties with the characters here for
means of illustration...)

---

Mason leaned back in his chair as he contemplated what
he had just learned.  He had sought to hack into
Sylia's mind, just as he had so many others, and was
unsurprised to find Sylia trying to hack back.  But,
for all the advances in computers and cybernetics over
the years, it was still fundamentally true that one
simply could not hack into a human brain like one
could
a computer.  The interface was simply one way - and
that barrier presented itself when trying to breach
Sylia's defenses.

So.  His grand opponent was human.  Doubtless, she was
now reflecting on discovering his own humanity.  On a
whim, Mason decided to calculate exactly how unlikely
that was.  Even before the disastrous quake over two
decades ago, Japan was a nation of elderly; despite
advances in medicine, for many people that necessarily
also meant infirm.  After the quake, Japan's
population
dipped so low it seemed the purebred Japanese might
actually die out someday, much as had happened to the
American Indians.  Granted, there would still be a
healthy and vibrant "Japanese" culture carried on by
natives of Japan with significant Japanese ancestry,
if
not 100% to the past 10 generations, but to the
conservatives, this was impermissably stained by
Western ideals.

Mason could not help but smirk as he recalled Quincy's
description of what happened next.  Mason, himself,
viewed what Japan had become as an improvement, not a
heresy, as did most surviving Japanese.  But those who
looked most kindly on the past also tended to have
large fortunes gathered over the years, and the Golden
Rule had never changed in principle, even if yen, not
gold, was now a more standard measure of wealth.  For
just a moment, Mason wondered if his distaste for this
racism was, itself, a "Western" concept that these
people objected to, but soon dismissed the thought as
irrelevant to his review.

Robots had, by then, become sophisticated enough to
mimic actual people, at least in most functions.  It
was a simple plan, requiring only the conspiracy of
the
right people.  Factories set up and "orders" coming in
like clockwork; the workers neither knew nor cared
where their wares were really headed.  Creating the
initial program was a year's work for a small team;
thereafter, each individual model was given slightly
different parameters from a random number generator,
selecting from a matrix of quadrillions of
possibilities, each one as distinct from any other as
any two randomly selected human beings.  "Birth"
certificates issued by hospitals that were
conveniently
remote, and conventiently "destroyed" every so often
in
case anyone got suspicious and looked.

The true human population of Japan now numbered less
than 10% of its citizens.  Given proper construction,
standard on all but the most advanced and experimental
models, only in hospitals or in combat would anyone
notice the difference, and with a mostly peaceful
society and a large portion of the new citizens
programmed to consciously seek out "cybernetic"
modifications, only certain doctors might be in a
position to notice the lack of actual flesh-and-blood
treatments - and all of those were either in on the
conspiracy, or programmed not to notice.  Mason
rememered asking if there were any resistors, to which
Quincy had replied, "Not any more.  They all died from
the quake, even five years later."

All of which led to the true secret of GENOM's
success,
and the true reason why these rogue boomers were such
a
pain.  The government was afraid, most of all, of
allowing the perception of depopulation, but
manufacturing so many replacement citizens overnight
was a real pain.

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