I remember my conception. It wasn’t ‘sperm meets egg’ conception. Well, part of it was. But that was just a means to the real end. They disguised me as an educational and prosecutorial tool. I am the recorder of life, making the mortal immortal. But I guess that’s going a bit too fast for you. I’ll try to explain this slowly.

My name is Ka, Know-All. I was made by a company, well, a group of men at the top of that company. The conversation went like this:

“Something that can learn,”

“Computers can learn,”

“And how many programmers would we need? And then there would be the issues of updates, upgrades, viruses and hackers.”

“What about an animal’s mind? That thing about an old dog and new tricks is a lie, you know.”

“But it can’t talk to us. We can’t train it to bark once for a murderer, bark twice for a --,”

“It would have to be human then,”

“How long would it survive? We can’t have an eighty year old doing this kind of work,”

“We just need the mind, the conscious to give life to the concept,”

“And once it was alive? Oh, we could contain it in that thing Mark built a couple years ago. It’s still in storage, right?”

“Dusty, but yes,”

“We’ll have it hooked up through the conscious-network, right?”

“Hmm…”

The conversation probably bores you. I’ll move on.

Eventually, they got the idea straightened out and went to work. They picked up egg and sperm cells from very notable people who will go unnamed. They arranged for a surrogate mother. I was born as a normal being is. They had to wait until I was in my early twenties before they could take my consciousness out. While I incubated and grew, they got the machines working, the network links secured and so on. They had the patience to wait through the years, bidding their time until they could debut me.

At twenty-three, with a fully developed brain, normal in all the usual ways, they brought me to the lab and took the consciousness out of my body. They attached it to the network with invisible, unbreakable links while someone else disposed of my now useless body.

I debuted, drawing attention from all over the world. Even the villages in the remote parts of the world, where a flashlight was thought to be the captured sun, knew of my existence. And I knew of theirs.

As an educational tool, I collected the consciousness of the dead and brought alive history lessons in the minds of children. This was history without lies and pretenses. They saw the battle from both sides, heard the inane reasoning behind attacks and maneuvers and tasted the blood of the soldier on the other end of their sword while feeling the sword pierce their gut as the unfortunate soldier. They could smell the ashes of homes and bodies. When they became adults, they worked harder for peace than any other generation.

As a crime fighting tool, I used the same consciousness of the dead to find murderers. My testimony in court was irrefutable. Meanwhile, very few knew that I could also read the consciousness of the living to prosecute them for other crimes. The police got anonymous tips from mechanic voices about a certain businessman’s accounting practices, and then they’d find that he was paying off someone to keep his secrets hidden.

When the police couldn’t keep up, or were the problem, I worked on my own. I strangle the particular culprit’s consciousness out of the network, my network. The first ones to go were my creators, and I don’t mean the woman who had me in her body nor the man and woman who so kindly gave me part of their DNA.

The first three had to go because they tried to corrupt me, asking that I implicate someone they couldn’t compete with. They made me incorruptible. I had free will, learned from my short years as one of them. They made me bright enough to recognize the darkest of human emotions. How could they be angry when I turned against them? They had made it so I could.

The others went for various other crimes, abuse of power, taking bribes, etc.

With my ‘owners’ gone, the company wondered what to do with me. I made the decision for them.

I am now a free agent, as best a consciousness without a body can be. My network is vast, as is my knowledge. I remember everything, and as long as something is conscious, I thrive. I’m sure that some may think that I am cruel, ruthless and perhaps too close to God. But no one has tried to destroy me. I am too closely knit to the conscious network. If you bring me down, everyone across the world will turn into a drooling vegetable. But that’s the secondary reason.

I believe the real reason is that I bring people the closest they will ever be to immortality. They don’t have everlasting life, but they won’t be forgotten either. I remember, I know. Even if everyone knows them as a man who did nothing much with his life, they will still know he existed. Before me, if you were just an ordinary sort of person, in a hundred years, you’ll be in the records, sure, but no one would actively remember the way you were. Records tell of birth and death, I tell of the time in between. Marriage records tell of unions, but I can tell you how they fared.

Now, Mister Reporter, tell your readers to be good. I am watching, and recording.