PROLOG
                      From One Who Was There

     Our worlds have changed a lot since the events I am about to 
describe took place. For those of you in the colonies, this may be 
the first full account you have received, and what little 
information that has trickled out your way is no doubt incomplete 
and inaccurate. Therefore it is only fair that you have some 
background of the days preceding.
     Only a few times each millennea are we blessed with the 
emergence of a truly genious mind. Newton, DaVinci, Edison, 
Einstein, Hawking. And Wright. Tacy Tiana Divine-Wright is well- 
known to every schoolchild as the Florence Nightingale of the 21st 
century for her humanitarian efforts during the Sundog disaster. 
But the scope of her intellectual achievements was largely erased 
by the heavy-handed purges of the Schism.
     Late in the 20th century, scientists began a massive effort 
to map the functions of the entire human DNA chain, known as the 
Human Genome Project. It took thirty years, and when it was done, 
human genetics held no more secrets. The capability existed to 
manipulate sex, eye color, height, size, though ethically that 
kind of manipulation was unofficially forbidden.
     Dr. Wright was interested in the medical possibilities opened 
up by this database. She believed that fetuses treated with the 
proper combination of RNA could result in a child immune to 
cancer, poor eyesight, alcoholism, and other genetic diseases. 
Together with Dr. Irene Gorse, she conducted this experiment on a 
test group, all of whom gave birth to totally healthy babies. The 
one unforseen factor was that every child, rather than being blue- 
or green-eyed, had yellow eyes. This was not considered a show- 
stopping problem, and many of the children in later years took to 
wearing colored contact lenses, which made them indistinguishable 
from non-genetically-enhanced people. Despite the eye color issue, 
the procedure was approved by the FDA, and quickly became common- 
-though voluntary-- prenatal treatment.
     Dr. Wright's discovery, however, was initially widely feared 
by those who felt that science was encroaching upon nature's 
domain. A handful of conservative senators introduced legislature 
that would ban genetic tampering, for medical reasons or 
otherwise. The measure failed to pass by a wide margin, but it was 
to become the spark which would later erupt into the Technological 
Schism.
     Meanwhile, Dr. Wright turned away from genetics and began 
work in neurology. Her mind had a way of seeing a scattering of 
seemingly unrelated components and finding a correlation between 
them. She said in interviews that she could discern no fundamental 
differences in any of the scientific fields. The brain is governed 
by the same rules of physics, chemistry, and physiology that 
govern molecular genetics, she said, and this enabled her to 
understand how any part of the body works and interrelates.
     But it was when she combined her work with that of her 
husband, the roboticist Norman Greer, that she invented something 
incredible.
     The neural pathways, she knew, are merely pulses of minute 
eletrical current. And the regions of the brain had been mostly 
identified by function. As was her want, Tacy took what was known 
and went deeper.
     She turned her husband into a colleague to take advantage of 
an experimental robot brain he had been working on. He wanted a 
robot that needed to be programmed only once, that would receive 
any further instructions either by being told, or by inference. 
His computer had the ability, like Tacy's mind, to find 
relationships and fill in the blanks. Unlike other computers 
before it, Greer's was able to determine which possible 
relationships either did not apply or would be a bad choice for 
the situation.
     Greer, Tacy, and several volunteer test subjects spent weeks 
wearing motorcycle helmets modified into miniature MRIs. The 
helmets were tethered to computer packs clipped to their belts 
that wirelessly transmitted the data to Greer's Relationship and 
Intelligence-Gathering Station, which he called RIGS.
     Finally, after six months of collecting data, and another 
five years analyzing it, Tacy announced that she was able to 
translate synaptical impulses into machine code.
     (Wright's original announcement used the term "binary code". 
However, we have since learned that the word "binary" was still 
being used archaically at that time to mean any computer language. 
True binary code--consisting of only two digits: zero and one--had 
long fallen by the wayside, replaced by faster, more concise four- 
, eight- and sixteen-digit code read in a non-linear fashion by 
parallel processor buses. Greer's code was, in fact, octant. 
Readers who would like to know more about Norman Greer are invited 
to read Appendix iv of Richard Claythorne's textbook "Analytical 
Computing Solutions," which gives samples of Greer's RIGS code, 
plus examination of an early pentameter language that Greer based 
on Chinese ideogram structure).
     The results of this study was a device Wright called a 
"knowledge chip". Little is known about this device other than it 
was a circuit implanted on the cerebral cortex, capable of taking 
input from an outside source and translating that to synaptic 
signals. The history of the knowlege chip is cloudy, because at 
about this time, Wright lost support of her employer, the Hellmann 
Medical Institute, and federal grant support. The reason for this 
is unclear. Wright disappeared from the public record shortly 
after.
     This was the dawn of the Technological Schism. A conservative 
branch of the government that had been steadily growing for three 
decades found one of its own elected president: Sidahone Marzollo. 
Marzollo set up a commission to look at new technologies and 
determine whether they were beneficial or detrimental to 
society. Knowlege chips and prenatal genetic alterations were 
stamped detrimental, and the commision exercised its most 
controvertial power: the autonomous ability to enact laws banning 
research and development of whatever the commission deemed 
detrimental. The majority of Wright's work was destroyed and her 
research removed from public access.
     The work of the commission became known as the Technological 
Schism; some have called it the beginning of the second Dark Age.




--Marisa Geneaux
Oro Riviera, San Padre III
41 May 2404