God's just this little guy in a labcoat (don't count his limbs, there's no need for you to get upset), and his angels are basically grad students assisting him.
He's running this big program, really fancy stuff...The first biological computer. It's a test, really. You know, proof of concept. They've assembled loads of other computer chassis, but they haven't put any bioware on them yet, until they can justify the expense.
And in this computer, bits go flying around the surface assembling structures and changing their environment. The structures are a display for the programmer, and the environment is the "cloud memory" that's used as a buffer.
It's a prototype, so of course it's a little buggy. There's a heat problem, of course, and that will have to be sorted before anything goes further. Also, some of the grad students have been empathyzing with the bits, anthropomorphizing them. A full third of them stomped out over ethics issues in the first days of the project, but not before writing some malware into the system. They weren't happy about the way the program keeps overwriting itself, killing millions of the bits every year.
Even in a high tech society, you will always have those who are superstitious.
Anyway, the program's just about run its course. The programmer is ready to shut things down on safety grounds, because on several occasions, the bits managed to move to the computer's auxillary node, and even planted a cute little flag on it. So some method of isolation will be necessary in future models, to prevent unintentional viruses from moving from one computer to another, as more computers are built.
And anyway, this thing isn't cheap, and research funding being the way it is...
(http://ts4.mm.bing.net/th?id=i.4972018058987087&pid=1.9)
:spittake:
This has occurred to me, actually, along with the thought that if Somebody decides to run a virus scan, we are all royally fucked.
You know you hear that there are seven billion people in the world but you don't always believe that. Let's face it, you can't even conceive of seven billion. Whenever you walk into a new zone, load up a new area, it's not like all the rest of it stays loaded. There's what you see and experience and the rest of it is just blank space, it's just empy, because why would they need to keep it up and running beyond the drawing distance. There might be a potential seven billion unique faces in the program but you'll never see them all, you can't, you just have to take their word for it.
Seven plus billion character models? And none of them repeat? You know, this is starting to sound pretty suspicious.
Cutting closer and closer to the bone, here. I like it.