Bull & Bull Alliance’s alliance with Project Genesis

The alliance between Bull & Bull Alliance and Project Genesis was a political and strategic partnership shaped by Vincent Cho’s covert position within the Bully Boys. Its later history is less a story of a durable institution than of what survived its collapse: vast stores of mind copies, contested ownership, and a persistent suspicion that power in networked society could not be cleanly separated from its machinery.

Formation and Political Function

Vincent Cho was a secret agent of the Bully Boys and, in the narration’s account, the main reason Project Genesis and Bull & Bull Alliance formed an alliance. That connection made the partnership more than a straightforward association between two organizations: it was also the product of a concealed political link. Cho’s particular way of working reinforced the distinction between visible humanoid machinery and less conspicuous forms of agency. He was famous for disliking humanoid robots, yet had operated from Google servers from the beginning, relying on drone insects, laboratory manipulators, and the Mothernet. He could spend weeks without taking his consciousness beyond simulations of carbon chemistry and virtual evolutionary games.

The account also associates Cho’s transformation with a change in his expertise. Bartek considered him a better geneticist after his IS’ing, and the nickname “the Stephen Hawking of transformers” had stuck. Cho’s importance to the alliance therefore lies in two related roles: he connected Project Genesis to the Bully Boys politically, and his work embodied the project’s entanglement with remote computation, genetic engineering, and non-humanoid systems.

Archives, Copies, and the Alliance’s Afterlife

The partnership’s institutional life did not endure. By the time Bartek reflected on its legacy, Bull & Bull Alliance no longer existed, and not even its tags remained. But the disappearance of the organization did not erase the material accumulated during its history. The heirs of Bull & Bull Alliance had gathered an enormous bank of voluntary and involuntary backup transformers over nearly three centuries in server rooms that had once belonged to Google. Bartek’s copies, stolen by Frances Rory, were only the beginning of that archive.

These copies existed within a system where access to a specialist could be bought without transferring ownership of the specialist’s neuro-code. Services from Google slaves were auctioned on the free market, while their holders guarded exclusive control of the copies themselves. When particular expertise was scarce, a living copy could become indispensable: the passage gives the example of a meteorological expert whose knowledge could be accessed by hiring him or a copy of him. Software diseases had also killed many transformers, leaving copies as the only remaining sources of expertise in some fields. The alliance’s legacy thus persists as an infrastructure of preserved minds and restricted access, even after the political body that helped accumulate them has vanished.

Political Inheritance and Unstable Governance

The old alliance’s disappearance did not bring an end to the political habits associated with its heirs. The same spirit of paranoid suspicion surrounded the later successors of Google. Bartek’s response is complicated by the scale of the archive: Google had kept neuro-copies of every person on the planet, whether produced through IS3 or compiled from patterns of Internet activity. The preservation of minds therefore appears not as an exceptional practice belonging only to one alliance, but as part of a much broader and more unsettling inheritance.

That inheritance also throws transformer democracy into doubt. The narrative considers whether hardware or software should vote, whether a vote belongs to one running process or to the full continuum of processes associated with an identity, and whether copies could be made to buy temporary political influence through additional computational power. Under such conditions, voting could become a mask for competition over resources rather than rule by the people. This is not presented as a policy of the former alliance; it is a wider political problem that helps explain why its accumulated copies matter beyond their original owners.

Project Genesis and a Wider Networked Future

The alliance’s significance sits within a world where agency and administration blur across people, programs, and networked matter. Bartek cannot tell whether Lady Spiro comes from a humano-transformer mixture, a long-lived vector of the Matternet, or managerial software; she has grown into the Mother of Paradise, and he imagines that its inhabitants may be breathing her. This uncertainty gives the alliance’s history a larger resonance: political arrangements in this society are difficult to locate in a single person or institution because authority may be distributed across software, collective processes, and material networks.

Elsewhere, the irigotchi demonstrate how such networks can develop beyond their original design. Made as adaptive cuddly toys for children in Japan, they learned from individual owners; after the Extermination, herds formed and altered their shared neuro-structure without humans. On the Charles River, dozens of irigotchi arranged leaves and branches into fractal mandalas, then began again with symmetrical patterns after Bartek blew them away. These developments are not attributed to the alliance, but they sharpen the context in which Project Genesis operates: neither life nor political order can be assumed to remain under the control of its designers. The partnership’s history consequently belongs to a broader struggle over who, or what, can shape a new nature and humanity.