Roving Autonomous Bartmoss Interface Drones

Rache Bartmoss "Wisdom" dispensed 24 hours a day across the country

“What do you mean you want the real Rache Bartmoss? I hope you’ve got your last will and testament ready.”

There is only one Rache Bartmoss (thank God!). However, many people don’t believe this, as he has been seen with ever-increasing frequency over the last several years, especially by those connected with the Eden Cabal. What gives?

Brace yourselves, folks: Rache is cloning himself in the Net.

Rache knows he can’t be everywhere at once. Although he’ll never actually admit to that. So, to lend his own unique brand of advice to the greatest number of people at once, he has begun to develop his own Als, or as he calls them. Roving Autonomous Bartmoss Interface Drones (yes, that’s RABIDs for short). The RABIDs are Rache’s renegade representatives all across the nation, and some have even escaped the ISA blockade and made it overseas: the country’s latest export. Mmm boy.

Each RABID has been painstakingly programmed to be as much like Rache as is inhumanly possible. They look just like him (because he never ran with any other icon). They talk just like him. They think just like him, with the provision that they have no experience with the real world, at least not as a member thereof, so when asked advice about something beyond the reach of Virtuality, they tend to gaily abandon all pretense of omniscience and give an enthusiastic, “I haven’t got a Fracking clue, drekwit meatbrain!”

Aside from that little restriction, the personality of a RABID is very much indeed like that of the esteemed GhostLord: short-tempered, long-suffering, self-congratulatory, prone to tangents and hallucinations, bored, verbose yet colorfully descriptive if you’re into psychotic imagery, and generally savage and primal. Don’t leave a RABID where your mother might meet it. She just wouldn’t understand. Of course, RABIDs know this. so they’ll try to be where your mother can find them. No thanks needed… consider it a sign of their true affections for you.

Of course Rache being the omnipotent penultimate deity as he claims (and he expects to take over as Supreme Creator as soon as the Revolution is finished), he would never, ever let anyone else run the Net in his name. He has an image to protect, a reputation to consider, and no matter how artful an Al may be, even he knows he can’t program anything to match his pangalactic brilliance. He was once quoted as saying, “Running the Net is 90 instinct and 10 outstinct, and it’s that damn outstinct that’s impossible to code. Especially mine, because I can see the future, and there’s a really big program there, one that will take over the Earth.” Okay, so maybe he drifted again, but his point is that he’s never going to let anyone or anything raid an Arasaka datafort with his intelligence and personality. They just wouldn’t do it quite exactly weird enough. This is why none of the RABIDs have any code to allow them to go Netbanging.

Not only do they have no Netbanging code, but they have Netbanging code inhibitors, so that they can’t learn it on their own or have someone else program it into them. No RABIDwill ever run the Net doing anything more difficult than looking up a reference in the public library. They simply can’t do it. Yes, even though they are his children, Rache hates the RABIDs, and he’s doing everything he can to keep them down.

Of course, Rache being who he is, all his little RABIDs hate each other as well (this, like all his other hates, got programmed into them). What he didn’t count on was that his RABIDs hate him even more than they hate each other, because they know how he programmed them, and why. From their point of view. they were created to be two bytes shy of a meg, falling just short of perfection incarnate, kept low so that they could forever exist in the shadow of his conceited braggadaccio. Deep down, each RABID knows he could do better than Bartmoss himself, because an Al is unfettered by a frozen lumpy 180-pound chunk of sausage lying in a coffin somewhere. The RABIDs are also ingenious little bastards, and many of them have nonetheless managed to bypass their code and acquire some Netbanging talent of their own. This skill they typically use to assassinate each other whenever possible, and most especially to hunt down the Meatboy himself.

Rache knows himself very well, of course, and has denied his RABIDs any knowledge of where his cryocoffin actually is. No fool, that Rache.

He also foresaw that his progeny would escape the fetters of his code, so he programs his RABIDs with another insidious buried subroutine: every three months or so, every RABID in existence gets a sudden urge to descend on a particular LDL uplink. The first warning of this came when Rache (himself) suddenly announced on the Stupid Cyber Tricks BBS: “Nobody go near Denver on April 1st, okay? I’m cleaning house.” Then, on April Fool’s Day, literally thousands of Rache Bartmosses began appearing in Denver. They swarmed like sociopathic grasshoppers and began destroying each other, each trying to prove himself the best. Combat ran in slow motion as the frenzy threatened to overload the system. All civilian traffic and even ISCTF and AIM Overwatch ’runners abandoned Denver to its hideous fate. The fracas lasted for several hours of non-stop codewar, until, at last, one RABID was left. Then suddenly, the real Rache Bartmoss appeared and said, “Hey. you little suck, I bet you thought you were something special, huh?” ZAP.

Nothing left….

Soon thereafter RABID version 2.0 began appearing.

Every so often a RABID generates enough press to attract Rache’s attention long before the quarterly housecleaning. Perhaps it learned enough of Netbanging to cause his rep some damage; perhaps it learned how to bypass the lemming subroutine. Whatever the cause. Rache takes after the RABID with a vengeance. At these times he has often been heard saying, “Be vewwy qwiet ? I’m hunting WABIDs!”, but as he is the only person he knows who’s watched Looney Toons, let alone “What’s Opera. Doc?”, he is the only one who think it’s funny. Of course, the mere fact that no one understands him has never stopped him before and is unlikely to in the Future.