"I need your help."
Merilia could not believe
what she had heard when she received Kara's whispering message in her
ears. Kara had never asked for help from anyone unless there was a
vital or fatal problem. It was not possible for her to consider
requesting any kind of support from one of the leaders of the
Minders, even for life and death matters. What could be the trigger
forcing Kara to put herself in a requesting position?
"The Minders and also
The Skinners also need your help," she replied. "Take you
hands and worthless skins off from their bodies and minds."
"You are not in a
position to argue with me, and we don't have time to play mind and
pleasure games for the moment Meri," said Kara strictly. "I
would not ask if there were another choice, you know. It is directly
related with the future of our children."
"You don't have
children, and you won't have any," said Meri with a deep sorrow
in her voice. She was willing to have their children with Met, but
the future was not visible claearly. The idea and images of children
were just like beautiful dreams for the moment. "Anmeri had
tried to make Bakara understand. I hoped to help you see life
differently, probably Met also let you know his wide view, but both
you and your father never succeeded to understand that if you don't
die, you cannot be born. Removing death from our universe will change
everything drastically, but the greatest problem it will cause is
that there will be no place for children in such a world. I don't
want to live without children, and I am sure that Met also will love
and hug his babies as soon as he sees them. Nature gives life. When
you walk away from nature, you get nearer to death. Your infinite
life is too far from the nature. It is therefore death. You life is
only, just death."
"I said we don't have
time," shouted Kara in a harder tone but also with signs of
fear. Meri wondered the reason putting Kara in such a panic. She was
also surprised to notice that she was very happy to see Kara in such
a situation. Feelings and witnesses were very powerful. In spite of
all her positive aspects helping her to see and conceptualize the
world objectively, Meri was not able to look at Kara away from
subjectivity. She was loving and hating her and she was always
feeling to be under the pressure of both. Her hating side against
Kara had secret feelings willing to see her having pain, to pay the
costs of what she had made to Met and Meri, and to all other minders
who suffered from Kara's strict actions. Meri understood that the
problem could be much more important than she could imagine. She
decided to listen to Kara. "I am ready to review the problem
with you," she said. Kara started talking fastly. She was trying
to reach a common solution with Meri while talking. After Meri
understood what the problem was, and how Kara was seeing it, Kara
also shared some parts of her memory with Meri to make her understand
Kara better. Meri carefully listened to and received Kara's messages.
"We don't have time,
we can lose everything. Everything we already had before, everything
we had created since our beginning. We can lose everything.
Everything! I know you will not find this reasonable, in such an age
with multi-level balance and counter balance systems, with dynamic
protection algorithms and units, how can it be possible to witness
everything to disappear immediately? But remember how Met lost his
memory. Our civilization is not a memory, but it is operating on
multilevel memories creating dynamic memories capable of creating new
types of memories dynamically. I was sure that our overall system was
a perfect one to assure that everything created by any element would
be recorded and archived for eternal access. You know that its roots
had been created much before Bakara and Anmeri, and it had reached an
almost perfect level during their common works. They had designed all
the mechanisms required to manage both real and virtual assets,
material and energy sources, storage and retrieval units,
distribution and collection channels. All mechanisms to manage
everything. It seemed to be perfect and it was perfect indeed. I was
believing in that with all my heart. The system also had numerous
recording, monitoring, evaluation, decision, improvement, renewal,
unit creation, and even new system creation modules. Everything
seemed to be perfect. You probably know the history at least as much
as I know. It had never been possible before to live in such safe
conditions with such a high level of personal freedom. I know, you
don't see the Skin System as a meaningful way of living. I don't
understand why you don't want to use the benefits of perfect skins
for maximum safety and eternal lives, and insist on surviving
limitedly in organic lives. But both Minders and Skinners were always
safe and they had equal rights in our era. Their rights were being
protected and assured by the wonderful creation of Anmeri and Bakara.
We owe them too much. We were living in a wonderful world, and
everything seemed to be perfect. Until today. Until when we had an
article error."
"It should not be an
important problem," said Meri. "What can an article do
alone? What difference does it make, if it exists or not? What can
happen if we lose billions of articles at once? The system will be
able to create them again in a very short time."
"You have not
understood the problem yet," replied Kara with signs of sorrow
in her face. The problem is not losing the articles from the system.
I noticed an article in the system about an hour ago. It seemed to be
normal. It was interesting indeed. I had a look at that but I was
surprised to find four attracting links at the end of the article.
You know, maximum number of links allowed in an article is two, and
using the maximum is allowable only at certain and justified cases.
Articles with excessive links are removed immediately, and authors
have serious penalties in case they have unfair reasons for
suggesting links. I couldn't imagine who could have dared to put four
links in an article. I traced the author and diagnosed the problem.
It was not a real author, it was neither a minder nor skinner. It had
been created with a virtual name and key number. A link was going to
an article of a virtual skinner, and another link was going to an
article of a virtual minder. As soon as I saw the article, the four
articles mentioned in the article were already available in the
system."
"This is really a
very serious problem," replied Meri. "It will not be
possible to estimate the total number of articles after a while, and
we will have great difficulties in finding and accessing the articles
we need. But I am sure The System have solutions for such cases."
"There are many
algorithms to protect the knowledge base by backing up the articles
and preventing intrusions, but this is an attack from an insider. It
is as real for the system as you and me. If it can find a way for
copying our level badges, it can use all of our privileges. What is
worse is, the insider is binary viral. It is like cells doubling in
their periods, and in this case the period is almost zero. Our
knowledge base will be occupied by artificial articles of the virtual
insiders if we can't find a way of blocking them. I was not able to
find a solution until now, and I don't even want to think the numbers
of current insiders and their articles."
"Can't we ignore
them?" asked Meri. ""Our recording resources are
almost infinite. We can continue accessing and living as before."
"There are two
problems which must be solved," objected Kara. "Our
resources are infinite for normal cases, in case of viral attack, we
must check and assure response level of dynamically increasing
resource capacities. The second problem is more difficult to handle.
Virally increasing data can make access system completely
inoperative. Our precious articles can be lost among almost infinite
number of articles created in almost zero seconds."
Meri thought the past and
the future. It was again a critical moment. Anmeri and Bakara had
created their systems for a better future. They were two individuals
working together at the beginning, they had become opponents after a
critical moment. It was not reasonable to think that Anmeri had
planned to be the leader of The Minders, and Bakara The Skinners.
There were some decisions in lives which were beyond all intentions
and experiences. They were the turning points of lives and ages. She
had no idea how the article error could be solved. In any case, she
had to do her best to help Kara.
"We are living in a
world which has a good system despite some problems Kara," she
said. "We owe Bakara and Anmeri together too much for what we
have. I believe we will find a solution to overcome all problems,
remembering them and their contributions. We are lucky since we are
not alone."
Before starting work, Kara
hugged Meri strongly.