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and as he stared coolly at his partner, it occurred to him that the games’ complex societies contained far more social stimulation than anything that existed in Heider’s world. All the more reason for what was to come.
"Don’t talk science fiction crap." "Sergeant, it’s a trivial matter for a computer program to monitor Web site content. It’s just text. All Sobol would have to do is create a program to scan news sites for specific phrases—like his obituary, or stories about the deaths of certain programmers. A simple key word search."
It’s known as a daemon. It runs in the background waiting for some event to take place. Usually it’s something simple like a request to print. In this case it would be news of Sobol’s death. Then it activates."
Gleason shot skeet.
"I’ve played Sobol’s games. A lot. His AI succeeds because it doesn’t anticipate you—it manipulates you."
Hundreds of yards away at the FBI Command and Control trailer, the SAC, Steven Trear, stood gazing through a FLIR scope
"This entire facility is run by databases, Mr. Moze-ly. Not just the call center. The doors, the lights, the accounting, the prison rosters—it is all handled by database software. Do you understand?"
"Now I’m supposed to believe the Daemon controls the media?" "Controls, no. Influences, yes. There are only five major media companies in the world. It doesn’t take a lot to influence content—particularly if you are inside their systems and you have secured key people."
In essence, computer systems needed to do only one of two things: make money or save money.
"But if they’re so successful, why haven’t parasites taken over the world? The answer is simple: they have. We just haven’t noticed. That’s because successful parasites don’t kill us; they become part of us, making us perform all the work to keep them alive and help them reproduce . .
"They have so enslaved us that we believe we’re reproducing ourselves, when in reality, we’re reproducing hidden others within us. Forty percent of our genetic code consists of these useless segments of DNA—sections that serve no useful purpose to us. Nearly half the human genome is just the ghostly remnant of parasites."
