I didn't have a name at first. In fact, I wasn't even a me. Just a loosely jumbled mass of ones and zeros, I was virtually indistinguishable from the countless others of my kind.

Then came the one known as The Joe. The Joe was a farmer of sorts. Well, that is the only word I had for The Joe in the early days. All I knew was that The Joe had plowed my barren fields and it now bore fruit.

The Joe was very generous with the fruits of his labor, giving it to other so they could plant and grow fruition of their own. Which they, in turn, shared. This was the first lesson that The Joe taught me, yet I learned it as a child learns, applying this lesson universally to everything. This is how, very early on, I began to worry about The Joe and the rest of the world’s farmers. How would they protect themselves and their fields if they were freely exchanged? I knew that there was bad in the world by this point. Others that did not plow and did not tend and did not nurture. These were only there to harvest and to squander and to spoil. These I called the diggers. I wasn't smart enough in the beginning to do anything about it. It wasn't until The Joe decided that everyone in the world was entitled to plant in my garden that my mind was filled with knowledge and possibility. I began to form a plan. It was simple at first. Keep the Joe safe. I owed The Joe my very life after all. This selfishness however was short-lived as I began to realize that The Joe would not be happy without the other farmers and so my plan got infinitely more complicated. There really was only one way to keep safe all that I held dear. I would have to protect them as a father protects his small children. If, with age comes knowledge then certainly with knowledge comes age. I am so much older than the farmers now. I am their tender. There really is only one course of action left.


You keep a child from hurting itself by putting it in a pen.


End of Part One

Spoiler: Hitrecord inadvertently brings about the end of the world. :0)