Commentary 12

56. Here's an old joke which continues to infinity, until the audience figures it out - which is usually on the 4th or 5th time you repeat it. Yes it's appropriate - the world-dreams we live are just a continuing joke. Once you realize it, then?

57. Ah, but Joe turns the tables on our Factors, Roger and Sue. He brings them into the white space to get across a couple of points. He wanted to let them know that he knows and to caution them that the Golden Rule works - and it's their choice to ignore it or not. The white room just brings this to them like an exclamation point.

58. Now we return to the adventure. Joe apparently likes this one as a story he can fit in other data he is looking at into a format that is more exciting.

We meet Father George, who is telling about what you would do with a valley of people would couldn't be controlled by any government. Truly free people. The Spanish conquerors called them fools, but the shoe might be on the other foot.

Alphonse alludes to what they are looking for is inside. And we find white rocks which might be from some ancient meteor.

I love the explanation of the Sunday School stories. It just came to me, like the rest of this story. I'm just the teller here (and editor and proofreader, and now: commentator). But it fits beautifully.

It seems that the Spanish wrecked the village by being greedy, and so just cursed the place.

When Joe shows his amulet, Father George hints at Al's involvement in this.

Unfortunately, we get only snippets of data about this area and the stones. That is the way of fiction, after all. Stay tuned...

59. Here's the Precept's grand show. As wild as this is, much of this is feasible. The main point is that people think faster than even machines can keep up. So he's broken the various areas out into subroutines and assigned real-time teams to work these over with computer assistance (of course.)

In this Sue and Roger now guess the motivation of the Prefect and why he may have placed those books in the dream for Joe to find. This would then allow him to create a massive update of the code, which is then marketable by the Corporation, which he has some sort of connection.

The final point was that they were tapping the entire resources of a supercomputer for a short while - very, very expensive, and so there were no follow-up shifts. Profit motivation and investment.

Unfortunately for the Precept, we are about to see his world undone...

60. Even Dog and Cat are concerned about this one. But his secret weapon (which we already know about from the above) is unknown to the Prefect (while he's already given Roger and Sue a broad hint). And the other is that they are taking this seriously - which wasn't really touched on above, but you can actually work it out.