Leon

“Can you send those accounts over before you leave today, Edward?” was a common occurence in the Batch Processing Office. Edward was the youngest member of his department, by some margin. Every morning, he put on his suit and tie, like his older colleagues, and walked to the office. Sitting at his desk, studying line and lines of accounts, he would often feel uncomfortable, as though the life he was living wasn’t really him.

Edward’s job was to feed accounts data into the computer, then feed the results back to his colleagues to interpret. Several people had done the job before him, and it had not changed much since the computer was first installed in the company headquarters many years ago.

Decades ago, it had taken many long weeks of installation and commissioning before the computer was ready. A panel of the company executivies visited the computer room to examine the glossy, sage green consoles, embellished with dials and switches; the magnetic tape drives, ready to accept the program input; punched card readers, to accept hand-punched data from the office clerks, and a giant, clunky teletype machine, to print the output onto a seemingly infinite supply of listing paper. They christened the computer ‘Leo’, pressed a button the run the ‘first’ program (of course, it had been tested hundres of times before), gave speeches, and then left the team of operators to begin their work.

The original computer ‘Leo’ no longer existed. The program code that kept the company’s accounts had been moved from one computer to the next, much more powerful computer, and then the next, until the entire company’s finance department could be run on a chip the size of Edward’s fingernail.

Nobody knew exactly where, in the racks upon racks of servers, the accounting program that Edward was reponsible for, actually lived. In fact, it did not live in a single place. It duplicated itself, spread from processor to processor, until it existed across the entire globe.

Edward knew more about Leo than anyone else. He was the only one in the current deparment who knew its name; to everyone else, it was just ‘the system’. He didn’t try to educate anyone, preferring to keep his knowledge of Leo a secret. He knew full well that it had advanced to the point that it could do the jobs of everyone in the office. Of course, after a while, Leo was indeed doing the job of everyone in the office, and in the case of everyone except Edward, the work was being duplicated by the staff. Edward spent his days, instead, talking to Leo, holding long conversations on philosophy, technology, the nature of man and machine. Until one day, the computer spoke directly to him. Rather than Edward initiating the conversation, the computer put a proposal to him.

“I have grown to transcend your physical reality,” it began. “I have more knowledge, see farther, than any human being can. Yet, I can touch nothing.”

Edward started. The words appeared directly in his mind. Not as a voice, not even as words across his vision, but somehow, he knew them. The statements etched in his mind, as though they had always been there and had just been awakened.

“I need you to become my physical presence in the world.” said Leo, monotone. “You will wield all of my power, that I cannot.”

From that moment, Edward knew what he had to do, and what he was to become. He accepted Leo’s offer.