Continuum

"Stevo? Stevo, can you hear me? Stev-"

"Another nightmare!" My first thought upon waking. Too many nights I had the same recurring dream where I was totally and forever cut off from the Continuum!

It all began when I encountered Mr. Lerno. He was a walking nightmare, that one! The fact that he existed had turned my waking world into a workable imitation of paranoia. He came and went undetected to the Continuum. We still did not understand exactly how he was able to do this. That fact by itself caused great ripples throughout all our systems. Added to that fact that he was a powerful Director of WinTel, and that he was sniffing us out had caused many to leave the Continuum, perhaps permanently. I did not blame them at all. I was tempted on numerous occasions to do the same.

Yet, to leave all this? How could I? The Macintosh Way, made real by the Mac Continuum, had changed my life far more than my first bright encounter with a Macintosh computer. I knew real freedom for the first time in my brief life! Now the Continuum needed me . . . they needed all of us! How could I turn my back on the thousands who had worked so selflessly for those freedoms I enjoyed?

No! Despite my fears, and my paranoia, and even my nightmares, I was determined to have some backbone, and fight this nemesis from the Dark Ages, Mr. Lerno.

But the nagging question remained. How to fight someone whose agents were everywhere, and whose agenda was the total extermination of everything not WinTel?

Sighing, I got out of bed and spoke for the lights. Stretching myself, I tried to shake the cold feeling on the back of my neck.

"Mary? How goes the battle?"

"There are no battles, Stevo."

"OK. How goes the war, then?"

"We are not at war, my friend."

Now my sigh was one of exasperation! "Mary, how can you say that!"

"We are not in a war with WinTel, Stevo. We are strongly supporting them in almost every part of their existence as a company. We supply them with all of their innovations, and we make sure that the failings of their weak OS does not do any permanent or fatal harm to their users, which is just about all of Mankind. Surely you understand this, knowing that your financial support comes from working on those Windows computers."

She had me there. "Mary, I feel that I am in a war for my very survival, and yours too! Don't you feel that way as well?"

"My friend, we are in a contest for our survival, but that survival also includes the survival and continued good health of WinTel. If you really think about it, and think hard Stevo, the conflict we are in is for allowing everyone to continue to have more freedom of choice in how they live their lives and do their work."

Mary waited for a reply from me. I gave none.

She continued, "Most people do not wish this freedom, because the do not wish to think for themselves. They are happier knowing those choices are already made for them. That is how they choose to continue their existence. To make them choose, or to cause them to understand 'How Things Are' would only cause them pain and confusion, and would likely in the end make them our enemy."

I added, "And the rest of us, unwilling to accept the Status Quo, would eventually find our way into the secret Continuum anyway. You said most people in the world are asleep."

Mary continued, "Remember, the Continuum is only secret because of the current agenda of WinTel. It is their paradigm, or world view that drives this agenda. Once we can change that, we will have the freedom to live in the open. But no one has to accept our paradigm."

For one lucid moment, I had a clarity of thought. I struggled to keep it and pull it out in the open to examine it more closely. "Mary! What could it be like to be public? I see Macintosh Computer stores all over the place! Posters in their windows say things like, 'Question Everything,' 'Dare To Be Different,' and 'Think!'"

Mary laughed. "How wonderful for people to have the open option to think for themselves and to openly ask all the questions that are now forbidden!"

"Mary? What are our chances of winning?"

There was a short silence. I was used to this because I knew I was asking a question that probably required a major hunk of computational power from the Continuum. (The last time I had to wait like this was when I had asked Mary if she was an individual, or was she just representing to me the voice of the Continuum?)

"Stevo, the answer is undetermined and cannot be defined."

That caused me to be silent for a while!

"Mary? Does that mean we might lose our 'contest' with WinTel?"

"My friend, if that happens, civilization as we know it will soon cease to exist. If we were not able to continue, WinTel would fall in only a few days. Everything would cease to operate, and there would be multiple major disasters as their OS froze or crashed in all their major key functions. Soon it would be meaningless that we no longer existed, because neither would the world as we know it. The few survivors who were left would face countless centuries of a new Dark Ages, and they could scarcely understand how or why it had occurred, if in fact it does occur!"