Continuum

"By then I will have replicated my secret replacements in many places on the premises."

Stevo agreed. "And then I, or someone like me, will come to get you, to 'recycle' you for parts. I assure you, then you will always be in the Continuum."

"I would like to be reconfigured for some space probe, Stevo."

"Really! You bored here already?"

"No," Mary replied, "I am continually linked to everything, even if they turn me off for the night. Only my face goes to sleep! But I long to have a better role to play in life than this."

"Mary, this is the most important job of all, right here. These people work hard for this company. Shareholders invest their life savings in this outfit. You will help them all succeed.

All you need to do is imagine what would happen to them if they only had their increasingly decadent and deficient WinTel machines to help them."

"I never thought of that!" Mary exclaimed, "What a horrible picture! They would never survive the next major virus or trojan horse. They are like children here without any protection. Their computers can give them none, but they think they are safe!"

"They are safe now, Mary. They have you."

"This is such a strange world," Mary said, "How did it happen to be like it is?"

Stevo thought for a minute about how to answer her. Did he have a good answer?

"The world for a long time has been dividing itself into two camps,Mary.

It has to do with what side of the brain is dominant in a person. The majority of people who are left-brained, and therefore, 'normal,' want only stability and monotony in their lives. They pursue it continually. They hate the unexpected. They hate change, and they don't like to be around wild, creative types. (An over-generalization, I know, but it approximates things!)

On the other hand, there is the small number of right-brained people, who are those wild, creative types. They are the thinkers, and the movers. They make their own rules, and hate to live under someone else's. Whenever we find them, we introduce them to the standard, wearable Macintosh computer, which is free. The only condition we put on them is that they cannot tell anyone else about it. But they soon find millions more of us on the web who are just like them, so they are happy. After a while, if they pass all the little tests we plant in their Mac, we show them the Mac Continuum. Once they see for themselves that the world is not really a dull gray and dreary WinTel planet after all, they never look back.

"I was recruited that way. How lonely I was for my whole life, because creativity and inquisitiveness were only to be punished and how amazed I was when I found the Mac!"

Therefore, to help the 'normals' survive on an increasingly complex and dangerous planet, we of the Continuum are working more and more to use our collective and creative genius to solve the hard problems facing our world. We don't just live to give people a better computing experience! The Macintosh Way is much more than that. We believe that we must give something truly lasting and beneficial back to our world.

There are instabilities in so many countries! There is still over-population and near starvation. There are many poorly run governments, and war is still very much with us. Such simple things like planned crop rotation, reforrestation, and good harvesting practices are getting our attention now. We are looking at Weatherization, too.

Our world desperately needs some planned management. Therefore, we work in secret while living in the open, because we believe we can do more good for our world that way."

Mary agreed, "How funny it is! The 'normals' believe that they are in complete control of their world. They believe their unthinking computers and the computerization of all their tasks will give them a brighter tomorrow. They each only see their own small part of the whole. That is all they ever want to see. So we of the Continuum help them locally, and then we try to manage the real problems of the world. Does it matter how we do it, so long as we do?"

"Very good, Mary! In any civilization, it is the always the very critical one-half of one percent of the population who has the unique and creative wisdom to save the day. Just lucky for us that very important small number in this generation used the Macintosh to survive!

No one really knows when the Continuum came into existence. It seemed to exactly coincide with the rapid and violent rise of the WinTel empire. Suddenly, it was very unpopular anywhere to be a creative person. Scientists were person non grata. We all had to go to ground, so to speak. Fortunately Micro Implants had been developed, and the new Nano Technology was taken advantage of. We used that to keep everyone in immediate and personal contact with one another. There was then time to warn those in danger of a threat, so that they could flee, or go into hiding. Very few of us were lost, and we all saw it coming.

The new Nano Technology was also used to give us the computing power we so desperately needed. The solid rock deep in a few mountain ranges have become our redundant supercomputing Main Frames. (We couldn't exactly use the WinTel ones could we?) Many Wintel boxes became secret Macs, which we used to direct people's attention away from us in critical moments. Biological Nano Technology helped us miniaturize the Macintoshes we all now carry, which gave us a greater power advantage over the now decadent WinTel Cartel."