Early80s

From CleanPosts

1980

In the Eighties, the WDF grew at the rate of four new women a year.

Robyn promoted the Cherubim Michelle to the rank of Seraphim, and the Opha- nim Ursula and Valerie to the rank of Cherubim. After that, the rank of Ophanim was closed. New recruits began to fill in the angelic rank of Do- minions.

Hannah and Diamond went to the Land We Know to enter the service of Ariel as guest "Amazons". They were balanced by two real Amazons, Ketheriel and Iadiel, who traveled from Alodra and entered the service of Robyn. They (like all the Amazons who served Chokhmah) had already experienced an identical Change. Ketheriel even chose to submit to the body-swapping scheme and accepted Dominion rank as a full WDF member. And she was not the first, nor were Hannah and Diamond the last human women to become Amazons.

Robyn was too busy getting everything ready for the Fortuna Summit, so she essentially canceled the Seventh Lustrum after the band did a brief stint of just twelve days in the studio. The would be no new studio album and no tour, except for a performance to open and close the Fortuna Summit in 1982. Instead, Hunky-Dory released a Greatest Hits LP. It was a retrospective of their first thirty years.

From the rockabilly of their first album they included The Whole Town's A Rollin' and She's Everybody's Baby. From the ski music of their second album they included Snow Bunny and the instrumental Seven Humps. From their morbid "Gothic" third album they included Life and Death Are the Same and One Way Trip. From their psychedelic fourth album they included Your Mind On Five Dollars a Day and the title instrumental track, Krautrock. That right there was the required eight songs.

But the band's greatest hits package was more generous than that. From Sell Out they included Dressed to Kill and Visions. And from Berlin School they included Jill Shaped Hole and Days to Come. Finally there was a new unreleased synth-pop track from their two weeks in the studio, Electric Hotel, which was added so Hunky-Dory's fans wouldn't feel totally ripped off.

1981

The politics of the Saiph League in the Land We Know were in such turmoil the various sovereigns of the warring city-states dared not leave for the Fortuna Summit, lest they return to their realms and find there had been a coup. They asked King Gruen Sunshield of the neighboring land of Hamar to travel to Luna and speak on their behalf.

King Sunshield arrived on Earth through the Pool of Bat-El, which was in Nyduly Wood, an important part of his own kingdom of Hamar. He was the first ruler from the Land We Know to be taken up to Luna by Astrodyne, where he was received with honor by Joy Millet, Robyn's daughter, as well as her husband Blaine, and there he dwelt in great comfort for more than a year while the Summit was being prepared.

Last to arrive on Earth through the Pool of Bat-El was King Arieh Strong- hammer of Menkal, who knew Robyn well, and he honored her rather than the other way around, for Binah was the deity of Menkal, and the King was very devout.

Two months before the Summit, Belial arrived in lunar orbit from the Jupiter system aboard the Adversary, which was in the shape of a great spinning drum 900 feet tall and 900 feet in diameter. Some of the human representives who were already gathered at Fortuna were most impressed by the size and power of the Adversary, and they seemed to be drawn into Belial's orbit from the very beginning.

As had been true for many centuries, Belial was in possession of the body of the Gerash Patriarch, and hy came with a large retinue of lesser lords and servants from among the White Beards, and an even greater host from the other four families of Gorpai.

The nephilim of Gorpai had been spacefarers for two centuries, yet they were still impressed by what they saw at Fortuna, especially when their host, Robyn's thirty-six year old daughter Joy Shy Bear, informed them the city was only twenty years old.

The Fortuna Summit was to be Joy's moment to shine. She was very proud of what she and her husband Blaine had helped to build here. Brand and his sisters Chayn and Del were completely caught up by all the mounting excite- ment as the various luminaries from both star systems and the Land We Know continued to arrive.

1982

From a new amphitheater built into the slope of Green Hill, Hunky-Dory opened the Fortuna Summit in January with a song Dory wrote just for the occasion. It began like this:

Can a Dream bleed Until it dies Drained of all hope through skeptic floors?

Shall the Living cut their losses? Bow to merchants With empty stores?

How Artistic Is our healing To grow hard crusts On shameful sores?

The acoustics of the long, narrow, and tall space that was Fortuna were perfect.

As the band played, eight leggy young WDF dancers performed, clad in fetch- ing short yellow skirts, and thirteen year old Brand Millet was old enough now to appreciate this. He was also clever enough to realize it was a honeytrap Robyn was arraying to snare him and keep him bound in Fortuna for his entire lifetime much like his own father.

Ariel and Yeshua were much amused to see their fellow elohim, Binan-Robyn making music with her band, which she obviously enjoyed, and they were de- lighted that the music was so good.

After the song, the opening of the Summit was a little tricky. Robyn did- n't want to express a pecking order in the sequence of personalities that she introduced, but it was unavoidable. She decided it would be best to stroke Belial's ego by naming him first. So Robyn set down her instrument and welcomed the Patriarch Hadraniel to Luna, and introduced hym as the incarnation of Belial.

To Hadraniel Robyn offered to make macros and SHe-3 available to power his spacecraft at Palato and hyz colonies on the outer worlds of Sol. "But do not forget," Robyn added, "my macros are only to be leased, and they will have the same protection that macros have on Earth to protect them from being tampered with and their secret revealed."

Hadraniel accepted Robyn's conditions with no objection at all, which was a so out of character for him that many thought he had something else up his sleeve, which in time turned out to be precisely the case. Macros and SHe-3 had the power to completely transform the Navy of Belial.

Hadraniel then offered in return dozens of his older space vessels, more than there existed WDF to crew them were it not for the many Amazons Robyn expected to gain after the Summit. The spacecraft he offered ranged in size from shuttles to full troop transports, and despite being nearly obsolete by nephilim standards, they were quite advanced by human standards. Robyn accepted this gift graciously.

After that Robyn introduced and welcomed Ariel, the yin incarnation of Chokhmah, and they jointly announced the merger of the WDF and the Amazons, which was already underway, and this new joint force would immediately be known as Femina Caelestis. They were the living angels of the elohim, ex- isting to serve them in all things. But Hadraniel declined their service. "I have the priesthood of the Eyes of Belial who are sworn to obey me," he said, speaking of his hyper-masculine mirror image of the Women's Democratic Forum.

Then Robyn announced the presence of Yeshua Bat-El, Lord of all the Earth, who had guided the history of mankind from behind the scenes since the day he was raised from death to glorified eternal life and came into his inheritance.

Yeshua decreed that the living angels of the new Femina Caelestis organization would be given hands of glorified nanotechnology flesh, exactly like his own hands in the days of his healing ministry in the Galilee district, and the angels would go forth to all the nations of the Earth, and also to all the lands of Gorpai, and heal many infirmities. "But there will be no need for them to carry this new healing ministry to the Land We Know," he said, "for healing is already the innate power of all trite females there."

Lilith Gervasi declared herself the prophetess of El, and this was affirmed before all by Yeshua, Ariel, and Robyn, but Hadraniel held his tongue be- cause he knew nothing of this, and hy did not care at any rate, nor did he care that he had not been part of the loop.

In the name of El, Lilith formally affirmed the nephilim claims to all the lands of the outer Solar system they had settled, and said these lands would belong to them forever, without repentance. But Lilith also said, "El requires Belial to allow those humans of the inner system, who are willing, to migrate to his colonies beyond four times the distance of Earth from Sol, and to allow humans to own land there as well, if they are successful in establishing themselves without aid."

Hadraniel agreed to this, and promised they would not be officially persecuted by the various colonial governments under his sceptre, but thinking of such entities as the Church of Racial Holiness, and the chaos in the rings of Saturn, hy added, "Take care. There are criminal elements in the Outworlds that I do not control, and they might not take kindly to human intruders."

And Brand Millet paid particular attention to this exchange, for it entered into his mind that he wanted to go to those outer worlds someday, rather than be caught here like a fly in Robyn's web.

The heads of the other four Families on Gorpai were also present, but they came bearing no gifts, nor were gifts to be given to them, for they were mere vassals of the House of Gorpai. It was Hadraniel who spoke for them here, and any tribute they gave would be demanded by Hadraniel, and any gifts they received would come from his bounty alone.

Taking his seat behind Hadraniel then was Iadiel, the Patriarch of the Gold Beards of the House of Sala. The Brown Beards of the House of Bellon were represented by the Patriarch Kafziel. Haziel Larund was the head the Black Beards. And the Patriarch Hochmiel Antero represented the Red Beards.

How little did Belial know the centuries of servitude by the other Patriarchs was like putting a huge spring under great strain. They were ready to break into full revolt at any time and rally around Ariel. But sha knew the perfect moment of opportunity had not yet come.

With the exception of Hadraniel, who ruled from the moon Palato, none of the Patriarchs had left the surface of Gorpai before this Summit, and now they were more than four light-years away from their home, in a neighboring star system, and the sight of Earth motionless in the sky over Fortuna filled them with wonder.

King Arieh Stronghammer had taken his seat of honor as the ruler of Menkal and he also spoke for the Saiph League. Prince Consort Evandr Firegem came in the name of the Queen of Alodra. And King Gruen Sunshield of Hamar was also there, after being the honored guest of Joy Millet for more than a year.

To the royalty from the Land We Know, Hadraniel offered to allow their sub- jects, if they were willing, to travel to the Sol system's outer worlds as well, but they would serve as paid laborers, with no right to own land.

Yeshua insisted these laborers had to come by Fold Gate, not the Pool of Bat-El, for both he and Robyn wanted to keep the location of the Earthside terminus of that portal secret, and reserve it for Femina Caelestis.

Lilith reminded everyone El's portal from the Land We Know to Earth had been closed since the day King Ravenmaster of Nath was put to death.

Speaking for the Republic of Nath (which rose up in King Ravenmaster's place) was High Lord Advocate Faran Blackseed, son of Bron Blackseed who led the Revolution, and he came bearing samples of many different weapons of war for the other rulers of the Land We Know.

These weapons were accepted eagerly, but in years to come it grew apparent that Faran's "gifts" were very much like the free drugs a dealer might give to prospective customers to get them hooked, whereupon they would return to obtain their daily fix, and it would not be free.

And it was said that Hadraniel and Faran Blackseed also exchanged gifts and many words, but of the nature of these neither one spoke.

The United States declined Robyn's invitation to come to the Fortuna Sum- mit. They went further than that, however, and leaned on their closest allies to reject the invitation also, including most of Europe, the entire British Commonwealth, Japan, and Saudi Arabia.

To Lilith's disappointment, the state of Israel also refrained from sending a representative. As a natural result of this embargo, the list of attendees from Earth read a little bit like a Who's Who of America's traditional enemies.

The People's Republic of China was represented by Special Minister Liu Chou-Lai, appointed and trained by the Communist Party solely for this Summit.

The Soviet Union was represented by the cosmonauts Aleksei Leonov and Oleg Makarov, who had flown to Midway aboard a modified Soyuz spacecraft called Zond, which had originally been slated to orbit the Moon until Apollo 8 beat them to it, and the program was mothballed. From Midway the WDF took the cosmonauts to Fortuna, and Robyn promised to leave their Zond spacecraft unmolested there until the Summit concluded and they used it to re- turn to Earth.

The Islamic Republic of Iran sent five mullahs from the Revolutionary Council. Robyn had to use male pilots to bring them up, because they refused to get into a vessel piloted by women. The Muslim religious leaders were in awe of Yeshua, who they venerated as the prophet Isa, second in importance only to Mohammad in their book, but Isa was there in the flesh and Mohammad was food for worms.

A dozen less prominent 'non-aligned' nations from Africa and Latin America, which fell neither within the Soviet sphere nor the American sphere, were also represented at Fortuna. What they had in common was a long saltwater coastline, and the gift they were to receive was beyond imagination when they discerned what it was.

Hadraniel introduced to the Summit what he called a Bot. It was a small silvery robot about the size of a human child, which he had caused to be made on Palato from knowledge obtained by his own access to the lore of the elohim. Binah had no hand in making the Bot.

He proposed to give the Bots to the Russian, and also hy would give travel- ing factories that not only made the Bots, but made more traveling factories. The Russians would have the exclusive right to operate the factories and Bots on Mercury, which was rich in mineral wealth and also solar power.

Lilith relayed El's permission to give Mercury to the Russians for their exclusive use. The raw materials found in abundance on that scorched planet were ideal for manufacturing solar panels, which the factories could also do when they weren't making Bots and more factories.

Joy pledged that Astrodyne would transport the Russian ores to market in return for a fair fraction of the solar panels they made on Mercury.

On the stage looming above and behind Hunky's drum kit was a great map of the Earth, showing the contours of the continents as they were now, and also showing the contours of the land beneath the waves, at the 2,000 fathom line.

To the left of the world map was a rough map of Venus taken from radar data obtained by a WDF probe. To the right of the world map was a color photo- map of Mars taken from photos shot by the WDF detachment at Deimos and up- loaded to the Grid.

Robyn walked to the left side of the stage and said, "The second planet in this star system is wrapped by a thick blanket of greenhouse gases that retain the sun's heat, making that planet far hotter than the Earth would be at the same distance. So Venus has too much air, and not a drop of water."

She walked to the center of the stage, and said, "The third planet in this star system will have five billion people in five more years, yet only twenty-nine percent of its surface is dry land, and much of that is desert or frozen tundra unable to support human life. So the Earth has too much water, and too many people."

Walking to the right side of the stage, Robyn said, "The fourth planet in this star system has an atmosphere that is only one percent as thick as the Earth's atmosphere, which causes any liquid water on the surface to boil away. So Mars has too little air and water, and it's too cold.

"But all three of these planetary inequities can be resolved with just two wormholes, very much like the one that took Adversary from Gorpai to Jupiter, except that these wormholes will be open all the time."

Robyn returned to the center of the stage and pointed to the world map. "One will have a mouth under the sea, near New Zealand, right here. The Earth end of the wormhole will remain at that level of the sea where the water pressure is sufficient to overcome the ninety atmospheres of air pressure on Venus. This will create a flow of sea water to the north pole of Venus, where it will immediately turn to steam, and the sea salt will be precipitated out.

Lilith addressed the row of mullahs. "It is El's command that Venus will be given to Iran, to rule as you see fit. It will become the home, if you so wish, of an Islamic Caliphate."

Robyn added a caveat, however. "Unfortunately, temperatures will remain too high for humans to live in the open there there for perhaps a century. The only thing you will be able to export at first will be the salt, but there will be much traffic of people from Earth to Mars, and material from Venus to Earth and Mars, and you will earn much money in transit fees.

"But your enclosed structures will require Astrodyne macros to provide air conditioning, and it will be a century after that before terraforming of the north and south polar regions will raise the level of oxygen to a life- sustaining level. But after that, you will be in sole possession of a new planet, quite comfortable in the polar regions. There will be one hell of a desert across most of Venus."

One of the Iranian representatives asked Robyn, "Why did you choose that remote spot for the wormhole entrance? Why not closer to Iran?"

Robyn answered, "When the Earth's sea level drops about twelve thousand feet, in two hundred years, the world ocean, which is currently seventy-one percent of the Earth's surface, will be divided into precisely two halves. South America will have two land bridges connecting it to Antarctica, as you can see here."

The map was large enough that Robyn had to walk to point to the land bridge. Then she returned to the New Zealand part of the map.

"So at that time, the only water connection between the Pacific and Atlantic ocean water lobes will be right here, between New Zealand and Tasmania. This undersea basin will be the location of the greatest city on Earth in the 23th Century. It will be the crossroads for all sea transport, which is now and always will remain the most cost-effective way to move goods from point to point on the surface of the Earth."

Robyn pledged to provide the mullahs all the infrastructure they needed to begin, and the Iranians agreed to allow Astrodyne to operate there. The oxygen they required to breathe would be taken from the Moon's own crust, smelted by electricity derived from solar power using Russian-made panels.

On Earth all the water from the surface to a depth of 2000 fathoms would be moved to Venus, pouring down a wormhole hundreds of feet wide like water draining from a bathtub. Of course, Robyn hadn't asked anyone for permission to do this (except for Bat-El) but there wasn't much anyone could do to stop her, and there were benefits to allay most objections.

At first sea levels would remain constant as the draining of the sea was balanced by a rise in sea levels attributed to an increase in the Earth's average temperature due to thermal energy released by macros and SHe-3. But by the 2020s, sea levels would fall very rapidly, and it would be noticed.

And the representatives of the non-aligned nations understood the nature of their gift. They were to receive much more real estate as the sea levels dropped to expose all that territory beneath the sea. If Robyn's scheme worked, the land area of the Earth would rise from 29 percent to 50 percent in only two hundred years. But they would begin to reap the benefits of that uncovering process almost immediately.

New land would be exposed off the coasts, and much of this land contained oil deposits which would become newly economical to tap, yet another gift for the people of Earth. Indeed, within another hundred years, all of the North Sea and Baltic Sea would be dry land, with only a single firth reaching southeast to divide the two lands at Denmark. Florida would more than double in width. And the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska that the ancestors of the original inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere used to cross over would be re-established.

Robyn continued. "At the south pole of Venus, another wormhole will take the hot atmosphere of Venus, which will still be under great pressure but supersaturated with water vapor, to Mars, where it is too cold and there isn't enough air."

Robyn turned to address the Chinese Special Minister directly. She said, "In a very short time, much less than two hundred years, Mars will have enough greenhouse gases at a high enough pressure to become quite comfort- able. It will remain only to convert the carbon dioxide to oxygen, and that will be accomplished by planting green things, and that is something that can begin almost immediately."

And Lilith told the Special Minister of China that El had assigned all of Mars to the People's Republic. "But the moons Deimos and Phobos shall re- main in the possession of Femina Caelestis," she told him.

Thus the imbalances of all three worlds would be set aright, with no input of energy aside from that which the elohim used to maintain the wormholes, but the elohim are living suns and they could do so without too much effort. "Still, it will require at least four of the five elohim operating continuously in concert to keep the two wormholes in operation," Ariel re- minded everyone.

"Five if we are to operate the Fold Gates as well," Yeshua said. And that last comment was aimed directly at Belial.

"As for Luna," Robyn said, waving her hands all around, "which I retain for myself, I propose to build a device which I choose to call the Circumlunar Supercollider. It will be a ring of electromagnetic coils that will encircle the entire Moon. It will be powered by the solar cells Astrodyne will obtain from the Russian operation on Mercury, and I will use it to make small black holes that will be allowed to drop into the interior of the Moon. Where Venus and Mars were being terraformed, I propose to graviform the Moon. If I reduce the diameter of the moon to about 900 miles, it will have the same gravity as Earth and it will be able to retain an atmosphere long enough to allow us to easily replace the losses."

She didn't tell her daughter Joy that the huge Moonquakes involved in that shrinking process would completely destroy her beloved city of Fortuna, but Robyn knew Joy would be dead from old age before it even began to happen.

"In the end," Robyn concluded, "if all goes well, then in two hundred years this star system will have four perfectly habitable worlds."

Those were the basic highlights, addressed on the first day.

The Fortuna Summit ran for many more days as all the details were ironed out, for there were many unanswered questions and technical snafus to iron out. It adjourned with a half hour Hunky-Dory set and much good feeling between all the parties involved, even Belial, to the shock and delight of everyone who knew hym.

It had been nothing more than a gigantic family reunion, and utterly unique. Never before and never again would all the elohim and the leading nephilim and humans meet in a single place.

And Robyn thought the Great Unveiling would immediately take place after- ward, when all these gifts were revealed to the whole world and mankind knew beyond all doubt that he was not alone in the universe.

But it was not to be. Robyn had been deceived. The human recipients of the gifts intended to keep them secret for as long as possible, to allow the maximum benefit to accrue to themselves. And the United States government decided it was in the national interest to keep everything secret from their own citizens for as long as possible.

When the wormhole began to operate in the ocean, and it was discovered by men, the United States stationed a carrier battle group off New Zealand, aided by destroyers and frigates from the Royal Australian Navy, to prevent all ship and air traffic from approaching the mouth of the wormhole, which was manifested as a deep and vast whirlpool in the ocean.

Robyn knew when the sea levels began to drop, and the citizens of the world found themselves staring at sandy beaches that continued to grow without limit, a lot of hard questions were going to be asked, and the secrecy would be lifted, but it would be a hard and sudden snap without a period of gradual adjustment.

Meanwhile a US submarine with its whole crew was lost trying to explore the New Zealand whirlpool. It found itself beached on Venus, rapidly rising in temperature to 900 degrees with no way to return. To accomplish that trick, a submarine would need to be fitted with macros.

1983

The Grid began in the late 70s as a network of Bulletin Board Systems, or BBSes, so that members of the WDF could be kept apprised of the latest news as easily as if everyone were looking at a single message board. Typically, each WDF Safe House was a node on the Grid, and they were accessed from home computers with slow 300 baud modems.

After that the Grid evolved into a message "backbone" that routed QuickMail packages between BBS nodes. This was better than a bulletin board system because it allowed individual users to make contact with some degree of privacy. The modems went up to 1200 baud, and the Grid migrated from custom CPM-based software on the Apple II to MS-DOS on the IBM PC.

In the aftermath of the Fortuna Summit the Grid was a constellation of PCs still running DOS, but they had shell accounts to accessed the Unix main- frame at Amnesty University, which was on ARPAnet, the primitive network of government and university computers that evolved directly into the Internet over the following few years.

As the Women's Democratic Forum and Ariel's Amazons continued to merge into one organization, Femina Caelestis began to communicate with genuine email on a mailing list, which was by invitation only. For its public presence, the Grid was also represented on the global USENET as an unmoderated news- group called alt.religion.femina-caelestis.

Modem technology progressed to the breakneck speed of 9,600 baud and it was feasible for one Femina Caelestis angel to communicate by Purple Cable over a phone line to another angel. After that it didn't matter what kind of computer they were using to access the Grid. Every angel became her own built-in computer.

Before the coming of human and nephilim minds the reality of the Grid was an abstract, purely mathematical space. But when the angels of Femina Caelestis plugged in by Purple Cable they were "inside" it, experiencing the Grid as a virtual reality.

To accommodate them there was a near infinite treasure of encoded images and sensations of Earthly existence one level up. A sister could experience another sister's hike, another sister's even course meal, even the sensation of being in love.

Between this level and the basement where raw machine language formed the very fabric of the Grid, a complex weave of sublevels lay atop one another, or grew out of each other, or compacted into each other. Each level was represented as symbols in the next level up, symbols that danced in a par- titioned universe that was itself a growing, changing, living thing.

Fragments of sound and video wandered down there as crosstalk and evolved like dreams. Characters from canceled TV shows carried on like ghostly afterimages, endlessly saying the same lines and going through every possible combination of interaction. Sets from other shows intruded. Spinoffs budded into a new layer and separated families forever. Lucy and Ricky would frequently appear on Star Trek episodes looking quite lost. The Amazons brought over content from Gorpai, which only made things more strange.

In the Grid, subroutines were not actually conscious, but they had been designed to seek their own uniqueness by linking sometimes silly, always incongruous bits together. This served to further enrich the whole.

Here where time was counted off in nanoseconds an accelerated survival-of- the-fittest was going on. Entities multiplied needlessly. Processing points took false memories from a supply of TV, movies, music, literature and human knowledge collected through out the Internet, even drawing from that highest of aesthetic endeavors: science fiction.

Yet nowhere in the Grid was there a true artificial awareness. There was no program that could look at it's own directory, see the file "AI.EXE" listed there, and know that it was AI.EXE.

Robyn thought that many processing points contributing to the generalization of stored memories would achieve consciousness. The creation of a rule of thumb from a handful of experiences would be a sign of this. But no purely algorithmic process had ever been made to demonstrate awareness. Consciousness seemed to be inherent to living things.

Robyn's hope was to give an artificial intelligence the memories of an an- gel, thus allowing her (or har) to be conscious during Data Storage time, living in an artificial reality. It was a hope that had never seemed to materialize no matter how fast communications became, or how much storage was available. It seemed the Grid could never serve as an independent world for self-contained artificial intelligences. It could only serve as a mind-tool for sisters who were enfleshed.

In the Grid, an angel could bring out her own memories in great detail and save them as a work in progress, allowing her (or har) to dig deeper and deeper without having to reconstruct everything for each journey. And a sister could even explore the memory-places recorded by others.

The body-image an angel had while browsing memory landscapes could be any- thing she chose. She could appear to herself as anything: male, female, animal, even inanimate objects. She could literally "be" a blade of grass, or the corner of a room. A human could be nephilim, or vice-versa. Or she could be a cloud of many balloons, which basically she indeed was, in the Gridspace.

Typically a sister was a cloud of about a thousand bots, or processing points.The outermost 300 or so were devoted entirely to defense, an automatic function that worked well below her level of conscious thought. Defense was necessary because the RAM space that was the Grid had a portal to the Net and the enemies of Robyn constantly attacked. Sisters kept running into Lice. These were very small, simple programs which are repeatedly written and rewritten in one spot, hoping to pop up in the middle of a sister's active code.

Since Lice did not move, and were so short and dumb, they weren't really dangerous, only annoying. But a Lice Queen was a bigger problem. Robyn wanted them cleaned up. Scrubbers were sent in, but some of these stumbled into Lice themselves, cluttered the Grid with their corpses, and actually made the problem worse.

Moles searched for the scratch-pad in the Grid where a sister's bots kept each other informed of all movements. With this goldmine of information the Moles dropped Borers at each of the listed locations and these carved out a meandering line of zeros in the sister's code.

The Dominion Nena had been completely wiped out by a Mole, and had to be reloaded from her last "safe copy" stored in a magnetic drum. There had been a snap in the continuity of her identity. The original Nena had actu- ally been murdered. She had experienced death. There was no continuity from her to the Nena that exists today, all because of the Mole attack. Robyn declared war.

She created a sphere in the Grid whose surface was put under constant saturation bombardment of "1" bits, and this wall itself was moved in and out to hassle any virus which tried to snuggle up to it looking for a way through. The clean interior of the sphere was completely isolated from the Net by a firewall. Access to it was was via a network purely internal to the WDF. The Grid was budded off from the Internet and protected from any further attack.

While 9,600 baud was sufficient for two sisters to communicate with each other using simple triggers, it was simply too slow to allow for the trans- fer of images, sounds, or to experience the entire Grid in one simultaneous gestalt. So Robyn resorted to the lore of the elohim and brought forward a piece of technology that would really allow the Grid to take off.

The gadget was a little cap called the "Plug" that was designed to fit on the 55-pin connector in the back of the skull of each WDF member. While wearing a Plug a member of the WDF could transmit and receive her thoughts and mental images to and from any other sister wearing a Plug.

A Plug didn't even need batteries, it derived its power from a pair of the 55 pins it was connected to.

A Plug didn't work by using radio waves, microwaves, infrared waves, light waves, or any other type of electromagnetic radiation. A Plug communicated with other plugs by exchanging a stream of massless particles called neutrinos.

Neutrinos were strange things. They almost didn't exist at all. They were "ghost" particles that didn't interact with anything--almost. They could penetrate a light-year of lead without being stopped, and indeed the macro- quantum crystal in the Plug didn't stop them, merely noted them in passing by loosening an electron for every triggering neutrino that passed gently through.

The released electron was an irreversible "observation" of the neutrino, which collapsed the neutrinos "wavefunction." Just by observing the neutrino's passage, it was collapsed from a spherical wavefront of superimposed probabilities to a real particle with a definite position, direction, and time of flight from its source.

Once a stream of neutrinos was set up, data was conveyed by withholding a batch of five neutrinos for every "0" bit. Robyn and Lilith could hold a mental conversation by exchanging a stream of neutrinos at a rate of, say, 12 million per second, while Hunky and Dory could simultaneously think at each other using a stream of 17 million neutrinos per second.

There was no interference between the two "channels" because electronic circuits in Robyn and Lilith's Plugs would set brief little windows where it would anticipate a neutrino to arrive at a certain interval, 12 million times a second, and other times it would ignore any passing neutrinos, so none of Hunky or Dory's neutrinos would be inadvertently "collapsed" by Robyn or Shyla.

The immediate result was that Femina Caelestis now had universal "telepathy" not subject to jamming, interference or eavesdropping. When a sister died by accident or murder now, her mind was automatically uploaded to storage space in the Grid. Eventually, by the second decade of the 21st Century, as the fixed Internet gave way to a mobile "cloud" paradigm, the Grid became known as the Swarm.

And that made everyone dangerously cavalier about their own personal safety, at least at first. Later, when Lilith organized the Girl Guards to allow the human members to more closely approximate the Amazons of Gorpai, and military discipline had been imposed, Femina Caelestis became the most dreaded military force in world history. For simply no one can prevail in combat over women (or yen) who take absolutely no regard for their own bodily existence whatsoever.

1984

With neutrino communications, Femina Caelestis had, in effect, broadband Internet, twenty years before it became widespread among the public. Robyn saw a way to use it to broadcast content. This receive-only version of the Grid was called InterWorld and it was run by Femina Caelestis at a loss, as a kind of hobby, just for kicks, but also as a powerful recruiting tool.

Femina Caelestis had a vast collection of music on tape, vinyl and CD. Albums were broadcast in their entirety where other stations only played selected songs. Every genre was represented. There was even a 24 hour Hunky-Dory station that not only played all the band's studio tracks, but outtakes, "B" sides, news, interviews, and "bootleg" recordings from con- certs. Recordings of the performances from the Fortuna Summit were avail- able. In the final 1985 Lustrum, the band even kept a microphone "hot" in the studio so InterWorld listeners could follow the creative process as they worked.

If an angel took in a recent movie at a theater, she automatically had a perfect record of the film, and it was a simple matter to get it back out on video tape for broadcasting over the various InterWorld movie channels. Box office receipts fell as a result, and the studios naturally hated it.

The most popular channel was "The Tourist Channel", which showed footage taken by the ladies in exotic locations throughout the world, and even more exotic locations outside of the world. Sometimes the channel bordered on the pornographic, but it was tempered by the female point of view.

Natalie, Cheyenne, and Leah became anchorwomen for a twenty-four hour news service that specialized in covering what the United States officially tried to bury. There were no commercials on any InterWorld channel, but at the top of the hour, for three minutes, one of these three attractive women would lay out for the world how things really were.

Sometimes there was coverage of events at Fortuna, or Freeball matches at Midway, and for years many viewers thought the whole news thing was a clever and entertaining joke, just like the vacation footage from what was allegedly "Gorpai" or allegedly "Hybla-Dia".

Politicians and bureaucrats were often embarrased by InterWorld Fly on the Wall news footage, which was captured by simply having a Femina Caelestis angel present in a room as they spoke candidly, and they were at a loss to figure out how a television camera had been smuggled in under their noses.

The Federal Communications Commission, or the FCC, had regulated the use of the public's airwaves since 1927 when it was known as simply the Federal Radio Commission. InterWorld drove the FCC nuts. The neutrinos of Inter- World carried "subversive" programming that sliced right through buildings, through mountains, even right through the body of the Earth like an industrial laser through butter, but they were picked up easily by the macro- quantum crystals in a simple, cheaply-made home receiver.

The FCC had no way to locate and shut down the InterWorld transmitters so they tried to go after the demand side. They began seizing InterWorld re- ceivers sold in stores, and when home-made kits appeared on the black mar- ket they began seizing those as well, often in warehouse raids by armed agents in blue jackets. Eventually they were emboldened enough to make household searches based on the flimsiest of evidence.

Robyn had Megan put together a class-action lawsuit to get the FCIC to cease and desist harassing decent Americans who exercised their freedom to use InterWorld. Her calculation was that win or lose, either way, Femina Caelestis would gain sympathy from the public in a big televised trial. It would be a blow against the Blue Team. And Robyn was dying to once, just once, win in court fair and square. Her move turned out to be a huge mistake.

In Megan's closing remarks she said, "It is now up to this court to decide whether the FCC is the benevolent guardian of our property rights, or mere- ly the instrument of the government's control of the media.

"You see, InterWorld is not only non-profit, it actually runs at a loss. We charge no monthly rates, and where we see the opportunity to provide free telephone service, home-delivery bank tellers, free entertainment and educational programming to as many people as possible, the FCC sees only lost revenue. But ladies and gentlemen, it's not really their money to lose!

"Before the Grid there were only the big broadcast networks, scrambled ca- ble monopolies, expensive satellite providers, and fibernets. But the Grid carries no ads, we scramble no movies, and protect no software. All we do is broadcast the content. For free.

"They can't even tell you how our Grid broadcasts are actually carried! All they know is that they do not use the electromagnetic spectrum. They acknowledge as much. But because the Grid operates by broadcasting, by whatever method it does, the FCIC interprets the Grid as falling under their regulatory oversight.

"The electromagnetic spectrum was seized by the government during World War One, and after that war it was declared 'public property.' The original FCC was set up to manage it for the 'good of all.' This is historical fact. The FCC refused to treat the airwaves as they should have been, as nothing but land, land which should have been sold or homesteaded with all the accompanying rights.

"Now we have a chance to set the affair right. This trial is about the FCC turning our trade secrets into community property so they can function as self-appointed spokesmen for the 'public interest.'

"We who operate InterWorld have totally written off the electromagnetic spectrum. Let the FCC regulate that to their heart's content. But ladies and gentlemen, do not let them extend their power by default to this new medium we have pioneered. Thank you."

The FCC was being represented by Norman Dunbar himself, the deputy assist- ant attorney general. His presence spoke of the gravity which the government considered this case to have. Indeed, some seventy percent of Americans were watching the trial come to an end with great interest. Ironically, many of them were watching on InterWorld.

He said, "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I direct your eyes one final time to the table before me, where we have arrayed the typical paraphernalia associated with picking up clandestine InterWorld broadcasts.

"You heard the testimony of Mrs Shy Bear. You know what's going on here. To receive InterWorld customers pay only a one-time cost of $99 for an assembled converter or about $39 for a kit. It's got jacks for your TV, your phone, your stereo, your computer, for every piece of consumer electronics in your house. Drawings for it are found at any public library and some hobbyists even build it from scratch. It's about as easy to make as a crystal radio for God's sake, and almost as cheap. Yet the whole theory of operation remains a puzzle to us.

"The thing is ingenious, really. I must admit, we have put our best scien- tists on it and we've failed at trying to weasel out how they do it. Obvi- ously it's a broadcast system and as such it would fall, by law, under the regulation of the Federal Communications Commission. That's the law we are asking you to uphold today.

"InterWorld is nothing more than a black market scheme to skirt around those royalty fees. So it has come down to this: The only thing we can get Kim Shy Bear on is a fifty year old law reserving regulatory oversight of all broadcast media to the FCC. That's it! That's the State's only defense. Yet the fate of America hinges on what happens today in that deliberation chamber with you.

"The petitioner is America's public enemy number one, guilty of waging a real war against this country. A war against you, ladies and gentlemen, a war that will only grow worse as the FCC finds it harder and harder to col- lect our fair share.

"Robyn skirted the law. Robyn operates her InterWorld at a deliberate loss to destroy the US edge on intellectual property by covering the entire en- tertainment industry under a non-profit umbrella.

"What artist can fairly compete on another network at starvation wages while Robin subsidizes lesbian sympathizers with contracts paid for by re- sources she has illegally hidden from us here on Earth? Yet it is those same hard-trodden competitor networks who loyally pay their royalty fees while Kim hides behind a loophole and sucks America dry!

"To end this war against the American people, the government asks you not to tie the FCC's hands in enforcing the demand side of the Grid. Thank you."

The lawsuit and counter-suit were proceeding simultaneously, and had wrapped up simultaneously. In the case of InterWorld Users v. Federal Communications Commission the jury found for Robyn's side. But in the coun- ter-suit the jury found for the FCC. InterWorld was declared to operate under a broadcast method, and therefore it fell under government purview.

The judge slammed his gavel down. "In view of that finding the $72 million dollar award for damages and restitution, as amended by the petitioner Mrs. Shy Bear, is denied, pending her expected appeal and the review by the Cir- cuit Appellate Court. Will both parties approach the bench?"

Dunbar said to the judge, "You honor, I request that Kimberly Shy Bear be taken into custody."

"Objection, Your Honor," Megan said, "how can my client's own answers in a civil suit be used against her in criminal proceedings?"

"One moment counsel," the judge warned her. He turned to Dunbar. "What is the reason for the government's wish to hold Mrs Shy Bear?"

"The method of the operation of the InterWorld network is still unknown. The court has just found it to fall under the FCC's sphere of regulation, but the FCC needs to know more before it can properly regulate the Grid. We request time to interview Mrs. Shy Bear properly."

"How about it, Mrs. Shy Bear?" the Judge asked. "What charges the govern- ment could dig up or how it could further proceed against you, I have no idea at this point. This is a real legal rat's nest that we've got here. But if you come clean about InterWorld, right now, I'll let you walk out of this courtroom."

"Your Honor," Megan objected again, "we are talking about trade secrets which belong to my client. She must decline."

"Let me rephrase my offer, counsel. If Mrs. Shy Bear comes clean about InterWorld, right now, I'll let her walk out of this courtroom with her seventy-two million dollar cash award."

Robyn spoke up for herself. "I decline, your Honor."

"Very well, do you have anything to say about InterWorld before I hand you over to the bailiff for transfer into the custody of the FCC?"

"Just this one thing, your Honor," Robyn said. "I got a little greedy. Not for the money, mind you, but greedy to win just one time in the public arena, fair and square. But the deck has been stacked against me from the very beginning. I see that now. It's entirely my fault. I refused to look before."

Fifty-nine years in one body was quite enough, she thought.

Robyn calmly perfomed an End of Cycle, stopping her heart while simultaneously outdialing to the Grid from her Plug. Her dead body slumped to the floor in front of the bench. The courtroom erupted in screams of shock, an eruption that was duplicated in bars and living rooms all across the nation.