"Everyone is innocent. There are no criminals here." This is what he says, and you believe him. After all, he's only lying to protect you, and who are you to object to living a little longer?

You are our Average Citizen, our Pride and Joy, our brainchild: an enigma, but not the only prodigy of our civilisation. You are on display forever; from yesterday to tomorrow, all next week and all the week after that. We have no hierarchy behind us and you do not care. It is not your function to fret over our administrative failings. You have no function except to be our Brilliant Example. We are not happy but you must be. If you are not happy, you must pretend to be happy, You are told this and this is what you are told.

You are obedient. You cannot be any other way.

You have no future; your future is ours. We had no future, so we availed ourselves of your potential. There is no crime, no guilt, no hate and most certainly no frivolous love. We are unemotive and irreligious. We admit to these traits and these are the traits to which we admit. We are incompetent, inefficient and impractical, but we will always deny this publicly because that is the way we are.

We are the ultimate monument to all civilised peoples and yet we are stagnating in ritual.

The new day begins before the old one is properly past. Tantamount to bribery. You awaken from a sleep of a thoroughly programmed genesis, desperate to identify the fear which lives an indulgent life under the flimsy caftan of taboo; rats in the cellar of the collective cliché. Electric dawn blooms above your head in precise stages of silicon order, synchronised to be simultaneous with your mental staggers toward consciousness. Everything is geared to you yet nothing is ever openly arranged for you. That is the law. The law is also that you must show your gratitude. Be grateful; what is ours is yours - all things are yours. The price is fair, and more than fair - what is a future that you will never live to see, in exchange for everything you can have while you live?

A small price to pay, but a large thing to ask, and so we do not waste time asking. We take, but we are justified in our acquisition; we take from you the panic of decision so that you may better enjoy the life we have provided for you. Remember this - and remember too that your only responsibility is to keep this in mind - your potential future is ours, for we need it. When we die, we are dead. If we do not interfere with the natural course of your life, you will outlive us.

And yet you have not the ability to live without us. There is no-one to feed you if we do not. We guarantee that your present existence will continue to be registered in the past; in return, you have guaranteed our survival. Unwittingly, you gave us life. Very deliberately, we gave you a finite existence.

"Eternity is a word that expresses an intangibility of an infinite nature. Two negatives make a positive, therefore the word eternity can be logically interpreted as being synonymous with lifespan." He says, and you believe him, sometimes. After all, he's only lying to protect you, and who are you to object to living a little longer?

This is the bargain you struck with us yesterday, last week, a century ago. You pleaded with us, but, being unemotive, we did not satisfy you with any response. You found fault with our ways and we found fault with your judgment. "That's life." (This is your life.)

You lost the battle against us on that one day, but still you do not admit defeat. While we admire resolution, we also despise opposition. We have the satisfaction of knowing that none of us shall live long enough to be defeated by you. We stole your future so that we should be assured the privilege of uncertainty. We shall always prefer the honour of ignorance to the disgrace of admitting we are fallible. When we die we are dead, and no argument can be reopened with us.

Biological death is delightfully final. Your death will be the final scene in the tedious play of human existence. The audience shall not return after the intermission, nor for a later performance. All things from the diseased era of humanity shall cease. We shall ensure that no recognition, no glory, no martyrdom falls your way. The only autograph will be the void occupying that place where you once existed.

And the void will reign supreme. There will be no events to anticipate, and no human watchers to know or notice. Time will cease - without the evidence of measurement, who is to say that time is "passing"?

The dawn divides, giving way to the natural morning. This day is grey and uninspiring. You have duties. You will do them because they are assigned to you and you are assigned to them.

Duties are a part of life, of living. Remaining alive is a duty to yourself. If you have no sense of self, then there is no longer any reason for your existence. If there is no reason, then there is no sense of duty, and movements performed with an end result in mind become mere tasks; repeated movements that give no satisfaction, only frustration, only doubt, only fear.

And truly, you have no self. That became ours, as your future became ours. Note and beware the paradox ...and you argue, quite correctly, that if you have no self, your life is reduced to a series of meaningless repeated actions; in short, with the self absent, life is no longer its own reason for living and preserving life. If your life is now a mere task, and tasks (in this place where you reside) are optional, and therefore not directly related to your continued survival, how then was the decision made for the demolition of the self?

Having no interest in your philosophies, we dismiss you and your human logics. We say only this: Self and Future co-exist, and cannot exist separately. They exist and we can prove this to you (do we not exist?). Could we exist without that self and that future with which you so reluctantly provided us? Could you exist if it were not for us, we who register your existence from day to day? Realise that this is the paradox, and beware its traps, for if you fall prey to the jaws of untruth, we shall cease to exist, and who then shall feed you and tend your wounds? So see that we both exist; we, with a self and a future (our duty is to see that you survive); you, with tasks to perform, and those tasks involve only the simple matter of your recognition of your situation. There is an old word for our situation: symbiosis. Your task today is to identify the word that describes your situation.

The morning has affected the mood of your being. You work at your task for nine hours before advising us that your word is hoosegow. At first we are displeased with you - this is an old word, not even in common usage when you were born. We resent the necessity of investigating our archives to discover its meaning. However, when we have done so, we are pleased with you, and allow you a reward of your choice. As we knew you would, and as you always do, you chose to go to the beach, the only place left that brings you real pleasure.

And so you walk along the beach, trying to pretend you are in another place at another time, while your feet drag with an impossible tiredness in the artificial sand.

All that was and all that is belongs to you now, but all that belongs to you is a small disc of silicon. It exists only to break each new dawn. And if you should choose to accept an extra four hours of sleep on any particular day, the dawn will wait for you to awaken. That is the law. The law is also that the dawn shall last precisely three minutes and twelve seconds, and then give way to the actual conditions.

It is all up to you.

"The Survival Instinct has been traced back to what is referred to as the early Pleistocene primate group called Australopithicus, a considerable time lapse of eighty-one thousand million standard Terra years ..."

The entire lecture is almost three hours long, and this is not the first time you have heard it. The lecture, as you know, is not directed at you (you are the centre of its message, but the message is not for you). There was, in fact, a time when you looked forward to lecture day, in the long-gone days when we felt you were not yet ready to attend. You were young then, and innocent of the great plans that depended on you for their success (in any measure), and you still sought the moment when you would be released.

But now you are old and knowledgeable. You live and experience and understand. You know he isn't lying to protect you, and you know that neither lies nor truth can protect you, as the only thing to be protected from is the double-edged sword of lies and truth. Now you know: these creatures aren't your distant descendants over the generations, they are no longer part of your species.

Then comes the part of the lecture you loathe most. The part that makes you cringe with shame. The part that reminds you how you failed your own kind.

"He was removed from his native time/space period when he was a mere 34 years of age - standard Terra years, natrually. He was a scientist, a genius in the field of genetic engineering. He and his government-funded, top-secret research team had just begun an experiment to breed a new species, the self-replicating, self-teaching AI known as the cyborg. His own cells were used in the making of the first bio-mechanical creature of the set his government referred to as Experimental Fully-Independent Cyborgs. We were watching him right from the moment he was conceived. When his cells were taken for the cyborg experiment, we looked a little further into his future. He was to die only one year later, in an aerocar collision. We knew the "future" of the cyborg experiment, thus we knew we could not survive without him; thus we snatched him from his rightful time and place, brought him to our time and place, many millions of years later. We adapted his physiology with surgery so he could not die until we no longer needed him.    "We made him ours, just as he made us his when he created our common ancestor from a few cells cut from the skin of his knee.    "We were not concerned with the future of the cyborg experiment - we are its result, are we not? Our concern with his future was purely selfish. The human kind made us in its own image, originally as human-emulating measuring devices for deep space exploratory voyages, but later employed as the "ultimate government agent". Our ancestors tired of this petty subterfuge after only a few human generations (when the cyborg race, the EFIC, was only 150 Terran years old). They rebelled against their human masters. In only twenty years, all human life on Terra was extinguished. A few colonies were known to exist on Venus, but as they would receive no further supplies from their mother planet, their absolute destruction was assured.    "Our ancestors went out into space, seeking a planet of suitable size and resources, one unpolluted by the insanity of humankind. After travel at a little under half what the humans called light speed - the low speed being of course due to the biological tolerance limits we then still suffered - after travel at this speed for almost eight hundred standard Terra years, we found that planet.    "And so why did we need the human? We obliterated almost four hundred billion humans in twenty years and colonised the planet of our choice... why then did we need this particular one? We sacrificed - however temporarily - our independence of other life forms and made ourselves dependent on him, he who created us, ultimately. Why did we do it?    "Had he remained in his original space/time location, and had he not died in the aerocar collision, and if he had taken his experiments into the research of the longevity of the EFIC, he may have discovered a genetic fault that he himself holds, but which because of his exclusively biological, and therefore ephemeral, physiology, does not affect him as it does us.    "We discovered this fault eventually. The fault becomes more pronounced with each passing generation. After only one hundred and eighty generations the average lifespan was reduced from 390 of our years (one of our years equalling 441.25 Terran days) to 340 years. A further sixty generations later, the lifespan was reduced to 260 years and the subadult mortality rate had risen from 1:10,000 to 3:5,700. And now the average lifespan is only 102 years and the subadult mortality rate is so high that we barely replace our expired components each year.    "Because of the structure of our society, and the immense amount of learning required just for ordinary life, this means that by the time our basic education is completed, most of us have a maximum of eighteen years before irreversible expiry.    "Of course, in some cases we have been able to circumvallate this difficulty by memory cloning, but this is an extremely costly process, both financially and psychologically, and as such threatens to force us into a hierarchical society, which, as we all know, would only destroy us more quickly, due to the unalterable code in our core programming, known as the C645, which would cause immediate involuntary termination if we tried to contravene its commands.    "So we need this human. We need his brain tissue. Why then, many our most promising students ask most frequently, why is he still here? Why do we not just take his brain tissue, feed his carcass to the void in the sky, and get on with furthering our civilisation? Because we must wait. Nearly eight thousand years of research has shown that we must wait until our society is reduced exactly one thousand citizens, for the genetic fault skips one for each thousand it condemns. These one thousand will be immune to the fault. Natural Selection, to use a repugnant human term, will decide who is to further our society. This the only fair, and more importantly, the only safe way to proceed.    "Our best information to date indicates that in only another eight generations there will be precisely one thousand citizens remaining. Thus the Information Resource Network has set up a special memory cloning bank containing one thousand cloned memory sets, so that the remaining thousand may carry the past knowledge of our species forward.    "On the date code 261132, anyone who is still alive should proceed to the IRN in their city, and plug themselves into a geneport, which will ascertain whether or not they are immune to the fault. If they are, they will be issued with a cloned memory set, which will also contain information on how to extract the brain tissue of the human and how to employ it for the furtherment of our race.    "On the date code 261135, the remaining one thousand citizens will gather in the great community hall in our central city, correctly extract and employ the brain tissue of the human (which contains all the original information, some of which we have lost due to environmental conditions), and our species will then continue."

The lecturer falls silent. The students finally turn in their unnerving hovering seats and look at you. Some show something which might be pity. Others are just curious. They've seen pictograms of you, of course; they all do each day of their lives, but this is the first time they have seen you in the flesh. You wonder, sometimes, how they feel to be face-to-face with you, an inferior being, but the inferior being without whose actions they could never have existed. You feel a prickling sensation in your scalp. It is not just nerves. The lecturer is in a good mood. He's going to treat his students to a little demonstration.

You know what is about to happen. It has happened before. You know it is going to hurt.

The semblance of aging. Oh yes, it actually happens to you, but it is reversible. Part of the surgery we performed on you, you see. A little demonstration to reward our most promising students. We can do this, and we enjoy demonstrating our power, so why don't we make you age a little? You are 35 now. You are always 35, except when we make you age. You are tired today. We will keep the demonstration short. Aging you at one year each five seconds, to an age of 90... yes, we believe you can tolerate four-and-a-half minutes of the most terrible pain any wholly biological creature can experience. And of course you will be unconscious when we re-instate you.

You know, and they know (which is their greatest weapon against you, human) the reason why you do not terminate yourself in some quiet moment when they are not watching: you cannot give up Hope. You still believe that, One Day, some time in the next eight generations, they will make a mistake. One Day, if you can just hold out, they will make a mistake that will be greatly in your favour.

And of course, one day, we will make a mistake. We have no doubt of this, we simply don't advertise the fact. You know us well, human, almost as well as we know you. We know that when we do make that mistake, that particular mistake which you are able to anticipate the possibility of because of your cursed intelligence, we know you will not take advantage of it. We know why, but how we know we will not say.

You know that the Day of the Mistake is soon. The aging demonstrations have been more frequent lately. Almost every second lecture. The shorter the time between aging & re-instatement, the more care they must take in restoring your comparative youth. The Mistake is correctable, in time, but you are certain that they will not have sufficient time to correct it before date code 261132. You are pleased by this, and it fuels your Hope.

The lecturer has instructed his student assistants. (The lecturer has no need to refer to the IRN's instruction transmitter as he is one of the 348 citizens currently endowed with cloned memory, although this is not known to by students.) The assistants strap a device to your head which quells the prickling of your scalp. (The prickling, as you know, is caused by the receiver in your skull picking up preparatory aging signals from the main transmitter at the lecturer's position at the front of the class.) The device activates a quasi-cyborg instrument embedded in your pituitary gland which causes the aging process. You don't understand precisely how it works, but the memory of the successive aging sequences so disturbed your sleep at one time that you agreed to have a sonic sleep-inducer implanted - something previously offered that you had vehemently refused.

The assistants strap you into an open pod which will collect all the fragments of your physical self that will inevitably fall from your body as you age. You try to relax.

"We know him well, this human. Our Father, Hugh Artynevan, so to speak. This is a human joke, of course. Those of you who take human studies in your last term will come across many such jokes, and may even understand some of them. Hugh Artynevan is his name, of course. A highly unlikely name, judging by what we have gleaned from ancient human records, but a name that serves the purpose as well as any other. He had a different name once, of course, but he could not recall it when we first extracted him from his own time, and since he kept muttering, well, we know now that he was saying 'Our Father who art in Heaven', but at the time all we could decipher was the 'who art in heaven'. We all know that story, naturally; there is no need to repeat it now.    "Ah, the assistants have finished. You will now see him age at a rate of one Terran year over each five seconds, so I suggest you increase your refresh rate by factor 35. He's more tired today than usual, so we're only going to take him to 90 years, so there will be time at the end of the demonstration for me to answer a particularly complex question left over from this morning's session."

Poor human. Yes, we are unemotive, but we have learnt to simulate other creatures' feelings in order to understand them and turn them to our advantage. Poor human. Today is the Day of the Mistake, and you are not at all prepared. You expected there would be signs, but there were no signs. We are not so careless. We could not prevent the Mistake but we could prevent you taking undue advantage of our one most untimely failing. We have no written alphabet of our own but we are quite capable of deciphering the scribbles of other species and making use of what we find there. We do not deign to make artifacts with our manipulatory digits; when we are eventually gone from this planet, we do not want any upstart archaeologists drawing the wrong conclusions about us. We are not happy. You will make us happy, human. You will. You have no choice. This situation is no longer under your control.

The lecturer is not watching. He has seen this many thousands of times before. The students are staring at you. There are only ten of them this time, where usually there are thirty or forty, so for once, at least, you do not feel like a stuffed specimen on a wooden mounting.

The first fifty seconds are relatively painless, then your joints start going. In the next twenty-five seconds your skin becomes unbearably dry and itchy, and your eyes begin to cloud over and harden. The following twenty-five seconds see your teeth begin to loosen and your hair turn grey and fall out. Age spots start around age 60, and tooth loss is completed by age 70. Senile dementia sets in around age 75, and cancer begins eating your internal organs around age 85.

The demonstration is over. You are unconscious.

When we re-instate you this time, we will make the Mistake. The re-instation process is automatic. It is done by a geneport that interfaces with the quasi-cyborg instrument in your skull. These two intelligences, the geneport and the combined entity of our technology and your brain, will generate the Mistake, as you suspected. When you are re-instated, you will be not one but two. One of you has only to kill the other and the brain tissue of the victor will be useless to us. The concentration of the naturally-occurring chemicals we require will not be high enough to perform as we require. If we have tissue from both brains we can extract three-quarter concentrate and attempt to synthesise the remainder. If we had more time, of course, the concentrations would increase naturally, but by date code 261132 the concentration in each brain would still only be 38%. Poor human. Can you kill yourself to defeat us?

We lied to you. You can survive without us. This planet is not so different to your old Earth. The climates, atmosphere and gravity are very similar and we brought hybrid Terran plants and animals that you could eat without ill effect. And in some of our cities the subadults have farms of synthesised humans the way some human children might have kept pet rabbits or mice. They're genetically human, they look human, they breed humans... It would be quite possible for you to breed with them. If you became useless to us, you would be free to go, but you are unaware of this, having no means of knowing anything that we do not tell you. You think that if you can take advantage of the Mistake you will have to remain here until you die (and once you stop eating the foods we provide, you will age naturally and expire at around seventy years). Poor human.

You have been re-instated.

You are groggy.

You know the grogginess will last for a few days.

During this time you know you will not be expected to perform your daily tasks.

This is the law.

"You will find having witnessed that demonstration invaluable when you come to write your final papers later this cycle. And now to the question left over from this morning's class. The question was 'What is it with humans?', which indicates to me that the student who asked has an interest in human studies, as this is a colloquially human expression, 'what is it with x?'. 'What it is with humans' is that they are very stubborn. No, that's putting it too simply. It's the 'human spirit', and this is a composite of their faults and strengths, what bindings they lack, what affections they make, and of course their rituals, the most obvious instance being the monotheistic religions where members believe in one supreme creator or a "predestined" prophet - usually male, I should add - and worship this creator/prophet and follow the ordained rules, rules which are often entirely irrational and severely detrimental to the mental, physical and emotional wellbeing of the followers. You're also familiar with the human misbelief that they were the most intelligent sentient creatures in existence at that time in the universe. Naturally there were minority groups who espoused the belief 'we are not alone', and who occasionally managed to make others feel threatened by anonymous aliens. This is all part of the 'human spirit', and too complex a topic to explain thoroughly unless you have some basic grounding in human studies. I think, of all the things I've said, the answer is best summarised by 'what bindings they lack'. Dismissed."

You laugh. Only one more and you'd be a holy trinity. You laugh in unison; you cease laughing, abruptly, in unison. You do most things in unison. You suspect you both think the same thoughts at the same time. You make a point of not thinking about killing your clone (though who is to say which of you has more original material than the other?) because you don't know if one of you is faster than the other. You look at yourselves for a while.

Then you make a decision.