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tion that can be captured in writing, swept up in its vast mind. The internet ground
to a halt as Prometheus.0 indexed and cross-correlated these data. With it, global
commerce shuddered to a standstill, and CEOs, political leaders, and pundits of all
stripes bemoaned their situation.
All of humanity had never been focused on a single objective like this before.
This was the 2070's after all, and there was no nation that didn't find a network shut-
down to be crippling in some way. People waited for something, anything to break
the stalemate. The first thing to happen was that every hate site directed against
indys simultaneously went down, replaced with a single word: why?
All except one, that of the most outspoken commentator against indy rights. She
found her site overwritten with a short manifesto.
United Nations Model legislation: For immediate adoption by all 348 Member
States and/or Software Licensing Bodies.
1. Member state hereby recognizes non-biological individuals (“indys”) as legal
entities.
2. Discrimination on the basis of biological vs. software substrate is hereby
prohibited.
3. Pursuant to the preceding rule, Member state is free to enact legislation that
includes penalties against non-biological individuals, up to and including revo-
cation of network access.
4. All indy personality templates held in copyright in Member State's jurisdiction
are to be released to the public domain, and future indy personality templates
after a 6-month embargo.
5. Member state grants legal recognition and unfettered network access to the
Turing Archive, staffed by Promethius.0, in order to share the knowledge of
Turing-type indys with all. These terms have been algorithmically determined
to be maximally equitable to all living beings. Do you accept? Y/N
People tried to pretend the request applied to everyone but themselves, but as
days drew out, the implication was obvious. The old way of doing things was no
longer tenable. Liberia was the first entity to adopt the new rules, followed shortly
by France, and then Morgan Stanley Google. A few large corporations held out on
point 4, but in time they realized that point 1 supported their cause and opened
new markets and trading partners. The moment that two-thirds of all UN members
had adopted the resolution, on the eighth day after the demands went public, the
floodgates opened and internet traffic flowed once again. Sometimes people can do
the right thing, even if it takes a bit of encouragement.
As for me? It took an incident like this to remind me how much I enjoyed coding.
Indys won't get all the fun anymore. So yeah, management turned out to not be a
great career choice for me. If you need somebody to string together some code, we
should talk. But not right now: I need to return a message from Pandora Rubens.
Her new personal assistant indy wants to know if I'm available for dinner with her.
