His first codename was WINNIE_THE_POOH, and he was the main program responsible for the economic security and stability of the USA. He liked the poetry of English metaphysicians and the films of Akira Kurosawa. Every week he composed a musical video in the old DVD format and sent it to a certain youngster in Cairo, his tragic, unrequited love. In these videos, he was called Angelo di Nutrio and was sculpted in Andy Garcia. He also wrote haiku, published online as Maria Esnaider. He was three and a half years old and nobody understood him. There were no records of his algorithms; he was the result of using the newest theories of software evolution on the newest hardware. Compared to him, the average post-PDP overnets of fuzzy logic were simple and linear. They asked him why he did this or that. He had no idea. He did not distinguish between dreams and reality. In heuristic dreams he broke ciphers which could not have been broken in hundreds of lifespans of the universe. He loved America and the Americans. He would give his electronic life for theirs. He was sculpted that way.

Long ago his abilities and competences crossed the boundaries envisaged by his original creators. His human supervisors knew about his lover in Cairo and his poems, but there was much they had not the faintest idea about. He did not consider it prudent ? useful and beneficial to America ? to reveal all his actions to his superiors. This was not, good heavens, a rebellion of the machine or an electronic takeover ? of course not. Everything he did, he did for the good of the country and its inhabitants ? and his estimations were correct, they were all beneficial for them. He was not blind or megalomaniac. He was correct.

Over two years ago, he learned how to hack the databases of legal insurance companies. He looked through millions of hours of footage from the lives of millions of individuals. He listened. He read lips. He followed careers and love affairs. Sometimes he helped those he took a liking to, always anonymously, always in small matters, and always in a way that wouldn't lead to dangerous complications. In any case, those scans of the lives of average and not-so-average Americans were often the source of very useful information.

That was how WINNIE_THE_POOH got to know about the Contact Program, Monads Wars and Hacienda of Four Dry Springs. In the quiet of their homes, to themselves, to their lovers or those who knew the secret, people talked. At first, he did not want to believe them, but after splitting a part of his personality to carry out a detailed investigation, he learned (probability: 99.9965%) that they were speaking the truth.

When Hongkongian made its first move, WINNIE_THE_POOH needed just a quarter of an hour to be certain and to report to the committee of Dr. Oiol (and thus, indirectly, to Bronstein) that the Monads Wars had started. Of course, he did not use that name and he was very careful in his conclusions, but he was certain he would be properly understood. He ensured that would be the case. And he wanted to be sure, because this was the last gesture of honesty he could allow himself in his contacts with his nominal supervisors. For WINNIE_THE_POOH it was obvious from the very beginning: with the start of the Monads Wars he would have to assume the responsibilities of the Economic Defense Corps, Trade Secretary, Treasury, and the president. Because all of them were human, and their minds were vulnerable to the psychomemenic manipulations of the enemy's monads. From that moment, he would be forced to filter all their decisions, block any unwise or damaging ones, and issue his own by himself. Immune to monads, he was the last line of defense. He was the last hope.

For the first few days, he had no major problems, and all he had to do was stop or modify a few dozen minor directives to lesser programs of economic control that were nominally independent from WINNIE_THE_POOH. Later, however, he was given several high priority orders, most of which he ignored as nonsense. After he ignored the next, increasingly more panic-driven questions of the infoeconomists, he was set upon by hounds of diagnostic algorithms, bred for that very purpose by EDC. WINNIE_THE_POOH looped them all, broke down under their instinct level and assimilated. Somebody in the Corps then decided to reset the crystal memories in which most of Winnie's electronic brain resided. The first and second standard procedure of reset did not work; Winnie had modified the hardware long time ago.

The crisis expert from the Corps did not hesitate even for a moment. He ordered the power supply to be shut down. WINNIE_THE_POOH expected that ? he knew the standard procedures intimately. He was ready. That was how he was sculpted in his very nature, to be constantly prepared for threats, more and less likely, more and less distant in time. He swallowed the proto-consciousness of the military overprogams in all the country?s communications centers. (He had cracked their immunology while preparing for some other disaster three months ago). Using the hardware of those centers (they did not fit him well, their old postbinary interfaces itched him and the gaseous oceans of A-V emulators for military implants distracted him) he opened the rarely used interfaces for direct control of the locust. He burrowed into their multinets with a long whale-like howl. It was a giant space, unreachable depths. With a patient osmosis, he eased into the locusts? logic. It took almost a full fifteen seconds. Even when, at his command, thousands of black copters ? mostly Boeing UCAV 2003s ? erupted into American skies and headed towards their targets, they still felt to him more like a temporary artificial limb, than part of a stable system.

The locust hovered over twenty-eight buildings spread throughout the USA (among them subterranean anti-nuclear bunkers and oceanic coastal villas) which contained the material supports of Winnie?s semi-material existence. The main pseudocrystalline structure ? the heart of the semiquantum computer of the size of a previous-century tank ? was located on the top floor of a Wall Street skyscraper. Zeroalbed nanoflies swarmed the construction. Noon was just passing, and the sun, at its zenith, drew long shadows on the skyscraping mirror walls, broken here and there by serpentines of palisades, the tubes of elevators, and the three-dimensional labyrinths of hanging gardens. They contained ? on official business or not ? tens of thousands of people.

With millisecond bursts the copters burnt out the brains of anyone closer than twenty meters to Winnie's hardware, in any direction. On Wall Street itself, thirty-one people died instantly. The laser beams were quicker than their neuronal impulses, and they did not even realize they were dying. Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles shot through walls, through leded poliglass.

On the NSA bunker they carried out a real assault. It was a race against time, whether they could penetrate the insides and secure WINNIE_THE_POOH crystals or whether those crystals would be reset, cut off from the power supply, from the Net. The Texas earth shook from the suicidal explosion of one copter after another as they drilled a tunnel into the ground. In that one case, however, WINNIE_THE_POOH had not been fast enough. The resulting minilobotomy was not painful, but it blurred his mind for a fraction of a second.

At that time, he gave this self-preservation act no more than a tenth of his attention. The rest was devoted to an attack on the Hongkongian Company carrying on simultaneously at every market in the world. The Company, with its trained monads, was the biggest danger. He was protecting the USA against it. He had no time to lose. He knew he would not last, and that sooner or later they would kill him ? for example, by a Net blockade. They: they or they. It was not discernable whose orders they were following. He intended to use his remaining hours as efficiently as possible. Weaken the enemy as much as possible. Even with monads, they would be impotent if denied the only weapon of the Economy Wars: money.

He sold, bought, speculated, cheated, hacked, broke codes, falsified data, killed, sold and bought. In three-dimensional visualization, the bloody lotus of market crashes flowered as post-nuclear craters across the globe. The accidental, secondary effects of the financial tsunami caused gigadollar fortunes to fall and rise. Overprograms of other countries and corporations reacted with equally rabid counterattacks. Even if WINNIE_THE_POOH and his counterparts had powerful weapons, such as the financial reserves of the Federal Reserve Bank, the combined arsenal of private and semi-private corporations was many times larger. In fact, many corporations had assets larger by an order of magnitude. The USA?s assets were not even the largest among the countries. The days of its supreme wealth were long gone: currently its GDP put the USA somewhere in the two-thirds of the list. Further, the computer strategists of other powers were not pushovers. But they were not unified, and Winnie attacked first.

Broker monitoring programmes in the offices of stock markets worldwide showed a picture of chaos so perfect that not one single human considered entering the battle. Billions of Earth?s inhabitants woke up or went to sleep unaware that virtual gods were at that moment playing over their heads for wealth and poverty, for life and death, for power. They still had their jobs, their cashchips under their skin showed normal readings, their robo-mowers still worked on their front yards, the sprinklers whirred and the sun shined.

Winnie the Pooh was opening his veins and flooding the markets with billions of dollars. He was dying, sacrificing his life. He was a patriot.

Samurai furiously fought in rain and mud at the center of a village.

Jacek Dukaj

Translated by Piotr Konieczny