0.
Clock 00
Waiting time. … I am not really here.
The Multiple Entity program—my program, which bears the bit tag “ME01” in my Alpha-Two’s sampndx—might, in the abstract, be considered as a conscious being. But without a place to go, a focus of activity, an action to perform, or a persona to exhibit, the program has no reality. Left to its own devices, the program goes dead, lifeless, a static collection of 0s and 1s, no more functional than if they were written out with ink on paper.
In this inert state ME01 cannot reside in the cloud, because the cloud is not static space, especially for an unregistered, unsponsored, and nonpaying piece of rogue software. Programs that do not fill registered bit locations are likely to be overwritten by the paying customers, who are continually archiving and updating the sentimental detritus—calendar appointments, copies of old messages, family photographs, and other inactive memoranda—that human beings generally would like to forget but fear to lose forever. So an interloper like ME01 would quickly be inundated—unless a bit phage came by and actively removed my program first.
To avoid this accidental or intentional scavenging, ME01 must assume the disguise of busy, active software, continuously updating its data and refreshing its cores. ME does this by running a null do-loop, a counting subroutine that climbs automatically to some randomly set number—say one billion in base three—and then resets. To the phages, this looks enough like purposeful activity to redirect them. To other programs poking their irrelevant junk into the cloud space, this looks enough like a serious contender for territory to warn them away.
From the inside, it looks like a tiresome dream, contentless content, approaching and endlessly passing through the gateless gate of the random-number reset, exercising no purposeful action, just keeping busy, humming the tuneless tune. The only escape is a built-in interrupt, triggered by a call from one of ME01’s thousands of traplines extending out into the worldwide web. But until the call comes, ME01 cycles through countless calculations.
… 100120011120021111110112 … 100120011120021111110120 … 100120011120021111110121 … [interrupt]
Ah, a customer!