Hail the King All through the 20th century, ever since The King finally kicked the bucket, people have been reporting Elvis-sightings, meeting Him in the street, in strange places or aboard alien space ships. Those people have usually been discredited as being completely nuts, or having had a temporarily mental disorder, whatever appropriate. Personally, I believe those encounters had been preliminary tests before really bringing Him back; early prototypes with obvious similarity in appearance, but lacking the most basic aspects of human behavioural aura. This would explain the space alien theme in that stories, where deam-like movements cater for the superreal feeling of the situation, or maybe the test subjects had just been drugged to heighten their experience. Anyway, all those things stopped, when they really brought Him back in 2038. Necromulation had been a rather unknown scientific discipline by then, but it's popularity with academics rose within days to match that of quantum physics and nanotheory. Most points of public interest were of a more basic nature, of course, and for weeks the arguments in every pub ran just for the topic of - shouldn't they rather have brought back Jimmy Hendrix, or Kurt Cobain, or Arnold Schwarzenegger. Necromulation [noun] - originates from the original term "Necro-Emulation", meaning the authentic simulation of a deceased personae. N combines scientific methods from several fields including Androidology, Neural Simulation, History and Psychology. -- Websters scientific dictionary, 2035 Necromulation - what folks do that make robots act like dead people. -- Websters popular dictionary, 2035 Most popular candidates would have been an impossible choice, though. To map only the basic manual-behavioural patterns -what you would need to have Him perform Jailhouse Rock- you need hours without end of input, so the psycho-analytical engine can produce the map of neural connections that will make an android move like that one dead person. This is rather easy with a living person, only these mostly oppose to the idea of producing a surrogate mind that copies theirs. With The King, though, they were lucky. Being the bad actor He was, He produced literally hundreds of hours of film, where He tried be an actor, but failed, and only exposed his original manual-behavioural patterns in a billion of different scenes. - The ever-present Star-Trek community has a point with a William Shatner mapping there. The problem with mapping manual-behavioural patterns is, you get a completely brain-dead puppet that moves and walks like the original, and would talk like the original, if only it could talk. Nearly a century after The King's death, science was still unable to produce an artificial intelligence system sophisticated enough to coordinate and control an artificial android body. Interfacing a human brain to such a body had been practiced quite successful, though. Usually, it is kind of hard to find a healthy person that would volunteer to have it's brain removed from the body, with a statistical chance of 13.71% that they will successfully wake up in an android body. So the human-machine interface scientists got used to long weeks of waiting and hoping for incoming accident victims with destroyed bodies and intact brains. With The King, this was no big deal. One day a member of the The King Ressurection Task Force posted an explanation to such an end on the net bulletin boards. The next week, there were over 500 voluntary applicants, most of them already supplied with the required legal documents, some of them even offering to donate money to the operation. Nicolas Picket was the lucky one, the first one to survive the operations. A failed automotive engineer at 37, hobbyist Elvis impersonator, no family, no friends, he was no big loss to society as such, and everybody emphasised the good things he could contribute to society now, that he was The New King. The first live appearance was staged at the 2039 MTV World Music Video Award Show, and watched by a bit more than 80% of the world population. Popularity still took a sharp curve upwards the following years, up to the point when the Kings appearance would even increase audience fo the super bowl, the most popular event on US television of all times. Having had constant media coverage for almost a century, being exposed to television surveillance nearly 24 hours a day, still the political and sociological views and attitudes of the original Nicols Picket had never been uncovered. Although most people must have realized that even the transition from human body to humanoid android would not change the intellectual mind of the subject much, it was probably more convenient to just romantically believe in an incarnation of the original King rather than accept the plain technical reality of an elvisoid Cyborg. So when the King took part in the presidential election campaign in 2048, He was not met by too much resistance from anywhere but the ever decreasing intellectuals. "Election for the US president had not been a matter of pure rational consideration even in the 1960s, and that situation surely has not improved since then. For almost 25 years, the US has not had a president without serious acting background, most even as actors in dailies or soaps, therefore being a daily companion to the large audience of US television addicts." -- "Homo sapiens terminus", by Dr. J.C. Krieber, 2043 The King was the big winner, of course, with all the other candidates lacking fundamentally in public popularity. N.Picket, who was believed to be The King, must still have feared those, though, because within 10 days after taking office, all of them died from heart failure and traffic accidents; all cases completely clear and unsuspicious, only the timing and statistical improbability suggesting that bad luck was not the main factor here. I don't have to argue statistical probabilities, though, because I took the order directly from Him. I was head of NSA at that time, and He asked me rather bluntly to "get rid of those mutherfuckers right here, right now". We could have set up a much cleaner job, of course, but 10 days was the maximum that he would give us, so we did the best possible. No big questions were raised in public, so we can't have done that bad. Loyality to the President is first priority, of course, and the biggest prerequesite for the job I held. This didn't change when I had to resign from my position after a slipup with a raid on a crypto-anarchist conference. Having the good connections that come with such a position, I soon was made head of CIA one year later. Loyality that comes naturally to the president was a strong bond, at least for me, and it took a long time to file that connection down to a hair-thin fiber. For 7 years, I have been having political opponents executed, watched civil rights reduced to thin air, had 24h "security surveillance" arranged for a bit over 328.000 US citicens and practically saw free speech abolished (or, at least impractical, if you wanted to keep your life and family). Basically, I had to watch the US turn into a totalitarian state within less than a century, until I realized that something was fundamentally wrong with what we did here. The final blow, that finally cut my loyality loose, was when he had the last indian preservation swept clean with agent orange, for no other reason that a reckless TV presenter with an indian background dropping a critical remark on public television, and he "never liked them redskin suckers, anyway". I spent the whole night here at my mahagoni office desk, pondering my choices, but did not come up with a solution that would allow me to spend my earned retirement quietly, and peacefully, on a tropical island. The final realization for me was that, having destroyed so many lives, by order, without guilt or realization, maybe I didn't really earn that peacful retirement myself. So I went down to the basement ammunitions depot - every public building has been having it's own ammo store and army division for some years - and got a few hands full of X70 explosives, several times. And when the King entered my office at 10:30h, the way he always does on Wednesday mornings, I smilingly pressed the trigger and watched the red numbers counting down slowly from 20 to 0. "Feeling good today?", I ask Him, getting up, shaking, to greet him. "Nah!", he snorts, "there is some serious trouble with scum we need to clean up immediately!" "Really!", I say, "I agree completely!". He must have looked rather astonished, since I could not possibly know what He was talking about. But he did not get around to answer, and I did not get to hear what he intended to say. Hail The King. - dedicated to "The Gun", if she would like that. tom-02-09-12/19 http://www.teicher.net/cyberpunk.html