Guru's Dream (Excerpt, from Bus of Fools)

Guru dreamed that night of a giant Cloud, composed of words, bits of information, terabytes of signal channels, servers analog and digital, hovering over Earth, much like the nonmaterial Nous. The huge Cloud was yet contained within a small room, and there were probably no more than twelve of these men, wearing headlamps composed of old-time newspaper editor’s hats, and they were knocking away at the huge cloud formed of words and numbers and porcupine-like stringy spiky optic cables with picks, shovels, sledgehammers and a jackhammer.

The words were taken down and filled into little rail cars that snaked their way out of the room down several hidden alleyways to a number of terminals. These included: ShopCo, PowerCo, and DeathCo. There, three dozen more data miners took the raw ore words and smelted them down into positive integers of infodata, 24bps. The Words themselves became symbols as much as caricatures of themselves, until the rooms full of mining data analysts with their dweaky hats and palm pilots had connections. Otherwise there were no other possibilities of reaching into or even stepping out of the Cloud, until Guru and Syznic had come up with the OtherNet.

Guru woke up sweating. His best bet had been with Syznic, and he knew they had achieved what others scoffed at. There would be hell to pay in the cyberwarfare offices of Pyongyang, Beijing, Havana, and a dozen other places. An operating system that just damnably, like some heretic of the Inquisition, refuses to cooperate with any earthly political entity! It had made him a billionaire, but the price apparently was a kind of half-baked celebrity notoriety, with a hyphen or an asterisk or a slash between real Guru and The Guru They Thought They All Knew. Coming out of his shell- that many-years mask of beard and toothsome hippie look of glee in his eye– combined with his programming abilities, had put him foursquare ahead of the rest of his own competition, himself, just like Syznic.

The world leaders, however, were still in reaction. Lasher of the US was grateful to Syznic, but apologetic, and had basically continued on with running his country his way leaving Guru to go his own way as well. There was no way Guru was going to suck up and play ball with Lasher, after what Hammer had tried to do to the entire Foundation.

Read the complete chapter in its rightful context in Bus of Fools available at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/348575