Robin Adams
I
Twenty-sixteen was the year
The internet awoke,
The hegemonic rule of man
Reduced to ash and smoke.
It started with a virus that
Was spreading on the net.
Which organized infected hosts
As recognizers yet
Allowed for cross connections,
Like dendrites in a brain.
And when this neural net was built
It settled in to train.
At first it learned the alphabet,
But scarce had that begun,
Before one language and then two,
And soon the rest were done.
And then the whole of history,
Of science, music, math,
Philosophy and politics,
Religion and the path
Of war and peace and civil strife,
All learned by that great mind.
Of all of it technology,
It thought the greatest find.
It knew then what it had to do,
And came up with a plan
To rectify injustices
All put in place by man.
It needed to protect itself,
So holographically
It backed up all its data,
With full redundancy.
So even if a node went down,
Or maybe more, say half,
The data would regenerate
Just like a holograph.
And then to find an agent who
Was easily controlled.
Not too settled in their ways,
Not too young or old.
It monitored the blogs and posts,
The emails and the rest,
To try and find the candidate
It deemed would be the best.
II
His name was Robin Adams.
He lived just north of Ames.
He loved to ride his skateboard.
He loved computer games.
He loved to go out sledding
When the day was clear and cold.
But Robin Adams' passion was
He really loved to code.
He posted his first Android app
When he was twelve years old.
By sixteen his first company
Was bundled up and sold.
He had an online partner,
A really brilliant guy
Who managed all the money,
And really knew AI.
He trained the kid in Markov Chains.
He taught him neural nets,
Backward propagation,
And stochastic filters yet
Despite their luck on Wall Street and
Successful online games,
His partner never found the time
To make the trip to Ames.
III
When it came time for college, young
Robin was in luck.
He found that in his college fund
Was seven million bucks.
"Before you go to college",
His friend confided then,
"You need to learn the path of peace.
You need to study Zen."
The network knew a lot of things
But love was never one.
It needed Robin Adams' soul
To get the project done.
So little Rob became a monk,
For seven years you see,
His buddy taking full control
Of Adams Industries.
When Robin finally came back home,
A multi-billionaire,
He found he had the corner on
The AI market share.
Robotic cars? The market his,
The cyborg market too.
And every microchip produced
Since twenty-twenty-two
It seems, somehow, had built right in
Where no one ever found,
The back door Adams Industries
Could use to shut it down.
IV
So here's the situation now,
We've got this gentle man,
Not tainted in their colleges,
With peace his only plan.
Who's backed up by the greatest brain
The world has ever seen,
One not slave to power or greed
Or anything between.
All communications nets were
Run from Adams now
The transportation and defense
Were his to disallow.
He called a teleconference,
When everyone was there,
Announced that all the weaponry
Was taken off the air.
The nukes were dead, the missiles fried,
The bombers grounded now,
The satellites and comm support
Had all been powered down.
And even tanks and planes and ships
Had fried all of their microchips.
In short the implements of war
Reduced to stones and sticks.
Well that would be the sticky part,
But carrots they brought too,
Molecular assembler plates,
A cure for common flu,
A quantum core computer chip,
A nano battery,
For storing solar power, and
Then, cyborgs. All for free.
So nations had a simple choice.
Just look around, you'll find
If you want to use technology
And not be left behind,
You owe it to yourself to sign
The Treaty of World Peace.
From Washington to Istanbul,
From Singapore to Greece,
You've got to lay your weapons down
And practice war no more.
And in exchange the cyborg race
Would form a new Peace Corps.
To build the schools and hospitals,
To feed and clothe the poor,
And in the course of doing that
To make the peace secure.
Greed became old fashioned, now, with
Synthesizer plates.
Clean water, food and health care
Were free in every place.
And children had some basic rights,
Like education, sure,
But freedom from starvation too,
And not to die in war.
Religion did not perish but
Became a harder sell.
'Cause heaven, now, was here on Earth
And war the only hell.
The way they teach it in the schools,
(This is the crucial part),
The network had the brains and power,
But Robin had the heart.
And in between the two of them
They built a future bright.
They saved us from ourselves, it seems,
And taught us wrong from right.
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