LET THE FITTEST SURVIVE:

THE COMING OF THE PUPPET KINGS

Akasz Kronos, the great, cynical cyberneticist of the Rijk, created the Puppet Kings in response to the terminal crisis of the Rijk civilization, but on account of the flaw in his character that made him unable to consider the general good, he used them to guarantee nobody’s survival or fortune but his own. In those days the polar ice-caps of Galileo-I, the Rijk’s home planet, were in the last stages of melting (a large stretch of open sea had been sighted at the North Pole) and no matter how high the dikes were built, the moment was not far off when the glory of the Rijk, that highest of cultures set in the lowest of lands. which was just then enjoying the richest and most prolonged golden age in its history, would be washed away.

The Rijk fell into decline. Their artists put down their brushes for good, for how could art-which relied. like good wine, on the judgment of posterity-be created once posterity had been canceled? Science failed the challenge as well. The Galileo solar system lay in a “dark quadrant near the rim of our own galaxy, a mysterious area in which few other suns burned, and in spite of their high level of technological achievement, the Rijk had never succeeded in locating an alternative home planet. A cross-section of Rijk society was dispatched, cryogenically frozen, in the Max H, a computer-controlled spacecraft programmed to wake its precious cargo if a suitable planet came within range of its sensors. When this spacecraft malfunctioned and exploded a few thousand miles into space, people lost heart. In that most open, broad-minded, and reasonable of societies there now arose a number of fire-and-brimstone preachers, who blamed the coming catastrophe on the godlessness of Rijk culture. Many citizens fell under the spell of these new, narrow men. Meanwhile the sea continued to rise. When a dike sprang a leak, the water pushed through with such violence that whole counties were sometimes flooded before repairs were complete. The economy collapsed. Lawlessness increased. People stayed home and waited for the end.

The sole surviving portrait of Akasz Kronos shows a man with a full head of long silver hair framing a soft, round. surprisingly boyish face dominated by a wine-dark Cupid’s bow of a mouth. He wears a floor-length gray tunic. with gold embroidery at the cuffs and neckline, over a frilled white high-collared shirt: the very picture of the dignified genius. But the eyes are mad. As we peer into the darkness around him, we make out fine white filaments floating from his fingertips. Only after much study do we notice the small bronze-colored figure of a puppet man at the bottom left of the picture, and even then it takes a while before we realize that the puppet has broken free of the puppeteer’s control. The homunculus turns its back on its maker and sets off to forge its own destiny, while Kronos, the abandoned creator, takes leave not only of his creation but of his senses, too.

Professor Kronos was not only a great scientist but an entrepreneur of Machiavellian daring and skill. As the Rijk lands drowned, he quietly moved his center of operations to the two small mountain-islands that formed the primitive but independent nation of Baburia, at the Galilean antipodes. Here he negotiated and signed an advantageous treaty with the local ruler, the Moyol. The Baburians would retain ownership of their territory, but Kronos would be granted long leases over the high mountain pastures, for which he agreed to pay what seemed to the Mogol a very high rent indeed: an annual pair of wooden shoes for every Baburian man. woman, and child. In addition. Kronos undertook to guarantee the defense of Baburia against the assault that must certainly come as the Rijk’s lands sank below the rising waves. For this he was accorded the title of National savior and granted droit de seigneur over all the islands’ new brides. Having come to terms. Kronos proceeded with the creation of the masterpieces that would prove his undoing, the so-called Monstrous Dynasty of Puppet Caesars, also known as Professor Kronos’s No-Strings Puppet Kings.

His own lover, Zameen, the legendary beauty of the Rijk and the only scientist whom Kronos regarded as his peer, refused to accompany him to his new antipodean world. Her place was with her people, she said, and she would die with them if that was what destiny decreed. Akasz Kronos abandoned her without a second thought, perhaps preferring the sexual multiplicity available on the other side of the world.

The broken strings in the Kronos portrait are purely metaphorical. The Professor’s artificial life-forms were string-free from the start. They walked and talked: they had stomachs.” sophisticated fueling centers that could process ordinary food and drink, with solar-cell backup systems that enabled them to stay alert, and work, for longer hours than any flesh-and-blood human being. They were faster, stronger, smarter-”better,” Kronos told them-than their human, antpodean hosts. “You are kings and queens,” he taught his creatures. “Carry yourselves well. You are the masters now.” He even gave them the power to reproduce themselves. Each cyborg was given his or her own blueprint so that it could, in theory, endlessly re-create itself in its own image. But in the master program Kronos added a Prime Directive: whatever order he gave, the cyborgs and their replicas were obliged to obey, even to the point of acquiescing in their own destruction. should he deem that necessary. He dressed them in finery and gave them the illusion of freedom, but they were his slaves. He gave them no names. There were seven-digit numbers branded on their wrists, and they were known by these.

No two Kronosian creations were the same. Each was given its own sharply delineated personality traits: the Aristocratic Philosopher: the Promiscuous Child-Woman: the First Rich Ex--Wife (a Bitch): the Aging Groupie: the Pope’s Driver: the Underwater Plumber: the Traumatized Quarterback: the Blackballed Golfer: the Three Society Girls: the Playboys: the Golden Child and His Ideal Mother: the Deceitful Publisher: the Angry Professor: the Goddess of Victory (an exceptionally beautiful cyborg modeled after Kronos’s abandoned lover. Zameen of Rijk): the Runners: the Cell-Phone Woman: the Cell-Phone Man: the Human Spiders: the Woman Who Saw Visions: the Astro-Adman; even a Dollmaker. And as well as characters, strengths, weaknesses, habits, memories, allergies, lusts - he gave them a value system by which to live. The greatness of Akasz Kronos, which was also his downfall, may be judged by this: that the virtues and vices he inculcated in his creations were not wholly, or not only, his own. Self-serving. opportunistic, unscrupulous, he nevertheless permitted his cybernetic life-forms a degree of ethical independence. The possibility of idealism was allowed.

Lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, consistency: these were the six high Kronosian values, but instead of embedding single definitions of these principles in the cyborgs’ default programs, he offered his creations a series of multiple-choice options. Thus lightness might be defined as “doing lightly what is in reality a heavy duty,” that is to say, grace: but it might also be “treating frivolously what is serious,” or even “making light of what is grave. that is, amorality. And quickness could be “doing swiftly whatever is necessary,” in other words, efficiency: however, if the emphasis were to be placed on the second part of that phrase, a kind of ruthlessness could result. Exactitude could tend toward “precision or “tyranny.” “visibility” might be “clarity of action” or “attention-seeking.” Multiplicity was capable of being both open-mindedness” and “duplicity.” and “consistency, “the most important of the six, could mean either “trustworthiness” or “obsessiveness”-the consistency of-we may use our own world’s models here, for the sake of easy comparison-Bardeby the Scrivener, who preferred not to, or of Michael Kohlhaas, with his inexorable and world-shattering search for redress. Sancho Panza is consistent in the reliable sense of the word, but so, contrariwise, is erratic, fixated, chivalry-maddened Quixote. And note, too, the tragic consistency of the Land Surveyor, eternally yearning toward what he can never attain, or of Ahab in his pursuit of the whale. This is the consistency that destroys the consistent; for the Ahabs perish. while the inconsistent, the Ishmaels, survive. “The fullness of a living self is inexpressible, obscure,” Kronos told his mechanical fictions. “In that mystery is freedom, which is what I have given you. In that obscurity is light.”

Why did he permit the Puppet Kings such psychological and moral liberty? Perhaps because the scientist and scholar in him could not resist seeing how these new life-forms resolved the battle that rages within all sentient creatures, between light and dark, heart and mind, spirit and machine.

At first the Puppet Kings served Kronos well. They made the shoes that paid for the land leases, tended the livestock. and tilled the soil. He had dressed them all in court finery, but their long brocaded skirts and dress uniforms quickly grew soiled and torn, and they made themselves new clothes more suited to their labors. As the ice-caps continued to melt and the water levels rose, they prepared to defend their shrinking new home against the foretold Rilk attack. By now they had learned how to modify their own systems without Kronos’s help, and they added new skills and aptitudes by the day. One such innovation enabled them to use the local firewater as flying fuel. Carrying bottles of the toddy with them in case they wanted topping up, the cyborg air force took flight without any need for airplanes, and caught and destroyed the incoming Rijk craft in spydernets. the giant booby-trapped metal webs that they hung across the sky. Underwater, too, they laid similar spidery traps (they had modified their “lungs” for submarine use and were therefore able to sabotage and scuttle the entire Rijk fleet from below). The so-called Battle of the Antipodes was won, and the skies and seas fell silent. On the far side of Galileo-I, floodwaters engulfed the Rijk. If Akasz Kronos felt any compassion as his countrymen drowned, he did not record it.

After the victory, however, things changed. The Puppet Kings returned from the wars with a new sense of individual worth, even of “rights.” To bring them into line, Kronos announced an urgent maintenance-and-repair schedule. Many cyborgs failed to keep their appointments at his workshop, preferring-in the case of those damaged in battle-to live with their disabilities: their malfunctioning servo-mechanisms and partially burned-out circuitry. Groups of the Puppet Kings became secretive, conspiratorial, surly. Kronos suspected that they were meeting covertly to plot against him and heard rumors that at these meetings they addressed one another not by number but by new names, which they had chosen for themselves. He became tyrannical, and when one of the Three Society Girls was insolent to his face, he made an example of her, turning against her his much feared master blaster,’ which caused an instant, irreversible deletion of all programs: in other words, cybernetic death.

The execution was counterproductive. Dissension grew more rapidly than before. Many cyborgs went underground, erecting, around their hideouts, sophisticated anti-surveillance electronic shields, which even Kronos could not easily penetrate, and moving frequently, so that by the time the Professor had broken down one set of defenses, the revolutionaries had already disappeared behind the next. We cannot say for sure exactly when the Dollmaker, whom Akasz Kronos had created in his own image and imbued with many of his own characteristics, learned how to override the Prime Directive. But soon after that breakthrough it was Professor Akasz Kronos who disappeared. No longer safe from his creations, he had to go underground while the Peekay revolution triumphantly emerged into the daylight to be greeted by the cheers of all the cyborgs in Baburia.

The so-called lost word from Kronos exists only in the form of an electronic message to his usurper, the cyborg Dollmaker. It is a rambling, incoherent text, self-exculpatory and full of accusations of ingratitude, threats, and curses. However, there is good reason to suppose that this text is a forgery, perhaps the work of the Dollmaker himself. The creation of a “mad Kronos.” whose sane mirror image he was, suited the cyborg’s purposes perfectly: and such is history’s appetite for the lurid that this version was widely accepted. (That single portrait of Kronos is notable, as we have remarked, for the scientists insane eyes.) Lately, the discovery of fragments of Professor Kronos’s journals has shed new light on his state of mind. A very different Kronos emerges from these fragments, whose authenticity seems beyond dispute: the handwriting is clearly the Professor’s. “The gods. too. murdered the Titans who made them,” Kronos writes. “Artificial life here merely mirrors the real thing. For man is born in chains but everywhere seeks to be free. I too once had strings. I loved my puppets, knowing that, like children. they might walk away from me one day. But they cannot leave me behind. I made them with love, and my love is in each one of them, in their circuits and plastics. In their wood.” Yet this Kronos, so free from bitterness, seems too good to be true. The Professor, a master of dissimulation, may have been plotting his vengeance behind a screen of fatalism.

After Kronos’s disappearance, a PK delegation led by the Dollmaker and his lover, the Goddess of Victory, took the scientist’s place at the next annual Day of the Shoes, and informed the Mogol that the Professor’s con tract was to be considered void. Henceforth the “Peekays” and Baburians must live on their twin islands as equals. Before walking out of the Mogol’s presence (instead of shuffling out backward as protocol dictated-a custom that even Kronos had not dared to ignore) the Goddess of Victory threw down the challenge that still reverberates between the two communities: “Let the fittest survive.”

A few days later a small. battered amphibious craft landed unnoticed in a forested corner of the northern island of Baburia. Zameen of Rijk had escaped the destruction of her lost civilization and made her way, against overwhelming odds, to the island refuge of the man who had left her to die. Had she come to renew their love or to avenge her abandonment? Was she here as lover or assassin? Her uncanny resemblance to the cyborg Dollmaker’s lover, the Goddess of Victory, meant that the Puppet Kings deferred to her without question, believing her to be their new queen. What would happen when the two women confronted each other? How would the Dollmaker react to the “real” version of the woman he

loved? How would she. the real woman, react to this mechanical avatar of her former lover? What would the Puppet Kings’ new enemies, the andpodeans to whose territory they had now staked so extensive a claim, make of her? How would she deal with them? And what had actually befallen Professor Kronos? If he was dead, how did he die? If alive, how great were his remaining powers? Had he genuinely been overthrown, or was his disappearance some sort of fiendish ploy? So many questions! And behind them, the greatest riddle of all. The Puppet Kings had been offered by Kronos a choice between their original, mechanical selves and some, at least, of the ambiguities of human nature. What would be their choice: wisdom-or fury? Peace-or fury? Love-or fury? The fury of genius, of creation, or of the murderer or tyrant. the wild shrieking fury that must never be named?

The continuing story of the twin goddesses and doubled professors, of Zameen’s search for the vanished Akasz Kronos, and of the struggle for power between the two communities of Baburia will be reported on this site in regular bulletins. Click on the links for more PK info or on the icons below for answers to 101 FAQs, access to interactivides, and to see the wide range of PK merchandise available for INSTANT shipping NOW All major credit cards accepted.