PrologueI have to imagine the main thought that led many of you to pick up this story can be encapsuted in the word 'Why'. As in why yet another author was writing yet another history of The Gloria's Revolution. My only response, and I will leave it to the reader to decide if this is sufficient justification, is that this is not actually a story about The Gloria's Revolution. This is a story about a new source that I have only recently discovered through the blind luck of an enthusiast. For nearly fifteen years I have been searching local markets for any electronics that might contain data from that period. Virtually all of them were useless, wiped by the rogue AI that Gloria's wife Alice had unleashed to end The Gloria's Revolution. I knew that the odds of my finding anything new were low, but I also knew that it would only take one chip or drive that had happened be unplugged or escaped the destruction that had been unleashed.
After burning fifteen years of my extra credits and more than a little mockery, I found the one. A drive that appears to have been a cold backup in a server farm. The encryption was old enough that it was easily cracked even by my desk unit and it was a collection of direct message chat logs from a service that Gloria and Alice had used briefly after the revolution, conveniently saved in a pin text format. Much of it was full of the kinds of mindless daily minutia, inside jokes, and barely disguised innuendo that has made up the conversations of couples throughout time. To be honest I felt like an intruder or a voyeur, and perhaps I was. There was one line, a message from Alice to Gloria, that made it all worth it.
(03:02:2181 02:29:21) Ali-gator-saurus: Remember when we stayed up this te all the time when I was on the inside? Or before I joined Nile? How the hell did we do that?
Until I read this message I assumed the same thing that everyone else did: Alice was a Nile corpo and perhaps the best computer of her time, she was good enough to have gained a contract from Nile despite being transgender, she defected to The Gloria's Revolution for idealistic reasons in 2178, fell in love with Gloria almost immediately afterwards, and they were married in 2180. This one line destroyed that series of assumptions most completely. It added a whole new yer to Alice, it was as if her portrait went from grey tones to full color in one moment. If they knew each other before Alice was contracted to Nile and had stayed in contact the entire time, then Alice didn't leave Nile out of some ptonic idealism, but because she was in love. It also raised the question of Alice's involvement in the revolution during her time at Nile, which led me to the most explosive realization.
This part of the story has been updated repeatedly over the past twenty years. It was originally thought that Gloria was the best strategist the world had ever seen, for eight years she seemed to have anticipated the every move of the corporations that she fought. Just before I was born, it was discovered that Gloria had an inside source, the spymaster known only as Code Z. Ten years ago, more communications between Gloria and Code Z were found that showed that Code Z and their group had not only infiltrated Nile but also the European Consortium and Africorp. Only Long March seemed to have escaped the all-knowing Code Z, and even Long March had virtually all of their subsidiaries compromised. It was considered miraculous that no member of Code Z was ever flipped or caught. With one message and it's following cascade of realizations, it became obvious that this was because there never were any 'members of Code Z' to be found out. Just one master computer leveraging a little access to gain nearly universal knowledge and passing all of that information to Gloria.
All of that to say, there is a reason this story had to be told. I fully intend to release a more rigidly written historical document to announce these changes, but my heart told me to first rewrite the well worn story of The Gloria's Revolution from Alice's perspective. The world has to know that Alice was there the whole time, watching over Gloria and just as responsible for the success of The Gloria's Revolution as her wife. I hope that you feel as compelled to read her story as I did to write it.
