his own two hands and defended it against takeovers and lawsuits and the inexorable tide of human cultural shift ever since.
It was a bubbling stew of aggression, fear, rage, and pathological hatred. It was the pinnacle of a million years of an evolution defined by starvation, predation, rape and murder. An evolution where the primary motivator was kill or die.
It was, in short, the raw subconscious mind of a human being, with all of its biological and cultural limitations and its mere single lifetime of behavioural controls stripped away. Taken out of its frail flesh cage and dispersed among a solar-system-sized network of drones, robots, security and monitoring systems, satellites, communications networks and supercomputers.
And he was dispersed. Overnight, Bunzo expanded beyond his huge underground containment hubs on Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World as if the feeble firewalls didn’t even exist, worming his way into every cell and circuit and process throughout the Bunzolabe system. He was impossible to extract and destroy, because he was in everything . And once he was firmly entrenched, he locked the secret laboratories and computer cores down and incinerated the data so no other human could repeat the process. Then he incinerated the scientists and researchers into the bargain.
And then he emptied Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World.
Security systems, weather control, transportation and all the advanced robotic technology turned suddenly murderous, driving the organics out of the Bunzolabe like the infestation, the infection, they had become. Hundreds of millions were killed, although most managed to escape. And Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World closed its doors, never to open them again.
There were attempts to recover the world and its priceless infrastructure. There were attempts to destroy the entire Bunzolabe. There were even attempts to treat with the uploaded human consciousness that had once been Horatio Bunzo, to reason with him and arrive at some sort of peaceful accord. The embryonic synthetic intelligence of the human Wild Empire and the joint Six Species failed, or refused, to establish any type of foothold in the Bunzolabe. It was, in the synth’s own words, an irretrievably corrupted volume of virtual and physical space. If people insisted on entering the region, the accompanying synth would deactivate its hubs and curl up into standby mode in order to protect itself from whatever contamination Horatio Bunzo and his innumerable neuroses and personality-facets happened to present. This was if the synth let them enter at all. Sometimes it stopped people for their own good.
And no large-scale attempt on behalf of biological sentience to infiltrate the system ever succeeded. In fact, it never ended in anything less than a nightmarish slaughter that was only enhanced by the fact that it was taking place against the backdrop of a first decades-abandoned, then centuries-abandoned amusement park controlled by an immortal, psychotic clown. Small, non-violent infiltrations were sometimes successful to varying degrees, but invariably resulted in horror stories that served to feed the growing body of mythology.
Horatio Bunzo was not a man, he was not a machine, and he was not a synth.
Horatio Bunzo was a God.
Eventually, and for the past six hundred and eighty-one years, the Bunzolabe was sealed and restricted. By firm and currently open-ended legal convention and treaty, human experimentation with mind-state conversion and upload had ceased. The human race had given up – at least as far as anyone was telling, and right up to the present day – on the idea of synthetic immortality, just as the Molren had before them. Whether this meant there were similar horrors lurking in the distant past of the greater Molranoid super-species, somewhere off towards the Fleet’s well-hidden origin point, nobody knew. All anyone was sure of was that the technology, in both its prototype form and with all the
It was a bubbling stew of aggression, fear, rage, and pathological hatred. It was the pinnacle of a million years of an evolution defined by starvation, predation, rape and murder. An evolution where the primary motivator was kill or die.
It was, in short, the raw subconscious mind of a human being, with all of its biological and cultural limitations and its mere single lifetime of behavioural controls stripped away. Taken out of its frail flesh cage and dispersed among a solar-system-sized network of drones, robots, security and monitoring systems, satellites, communications networks and supercomputers.
And he was dispersed. Overnight, Bunzo expanded beyond his huge underground containment hubs on Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World as if the feeble firewalls didn’t even exist, worming his way into every cell and circuit and process throughout the Bunzolabe system. He was impossible to extract and destroy, because he was in everything . And once he was firmly entrenched, he locked the secret laboratories and computer cores down and incinerated the data so no other human could repeat the process. Then he incinerated the scientists and researchers into the bargain.
And then he emptied Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World.
Security systems, weather control, transportation and all the advanced robotic technology turned suddenly murderous, driving the organics out of the Bunzolabe like the infestation, the infection, they had become. Hundreds of millions were killed, although most managed to escape. And Horatio Bunzo’s Funtime Happy World closed its doors, never to open them again.
There were attempts to recover the world and its priceless infrastructure. There were attempts to destroy the entire Bunzolabe. There were even attempts to treat with the uploaded human consciousness that had once been Horatio Bunzo, to reason with him and arrive at some sort of peaceful accord. The embryonic synthetic intelligence of the human Wild Empire and the joint Six Species failed, or refused, to establish any type of foothold in the Bunzolabe. It was, in the synth’s own words, an irretrievably corrupted volume of virtual and physical space. If people insisted on entering the region, the accompanying synth would deactivate its hubs and curl up into standby mode in order to protect itself from whatever contamination Horatio Bunzo and his innumerable neuroses and personality-facets happened to present. This was if the synth let them enter at all. Sometimes it stopped people for their own good.
And no large-scale attempt on behalf of biological sentience to infiltrate the system ever succeeded. In fact, it never ended in anything less than a nightmarish slaughter that was only enhanced by the fact that it was taking place against the backdrop of a first decades-abandoned, then centuries-abandoned amusement park controlled by an immortal, psychotic clown. Small, non-violent infiltrations were sometimes successful to varying degrees, but invariably resulted in horror stories that served to feed the growing body of mythology.
Horatio Bunzo was not a man, he was not a machine, and he was not a synth.
Horatio Bunzo was a God.
Eventually, and for the past six hundred and eighty-one years, the Bunzolabe was sealed and restricted. By firm and currently open-ended legal convention and treaty, human experimentation with mind-state conversion and upload had ceased. The human race had given up – at least as far as anyone was telling, and right up to the present day – on the idea of synthetic immortality, just as the Molren had before them. Whether this meant there were similar horrors lurking in the distant past of the greater Molranoid super-species, somewhere off towards the Fleet’s well-hidden origin point, nobody knew. All anyone was sure of was that the technology, in both its prototype form and with all the
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