war and profits

vox

a decade or so ago, spamming escalated to the point where full-fledged AIs were sent out to pollute VQs and vidchats, overwhelming the old-style Turing tests used to slow the flow of unwanted advertising. but, turns out that the technological war never went much further than that. interestingly, the best Turing test out there (and, admittedly, it is still rather flawed) is human interaction. Embodied in the Prisoner's Dilemma example of game theory. ultimately, business relies on trust, and if you can't trust the advertiser, AI or not, you're not going to buy. clearly, spammers can glean enough money from the naive newbie, but what the escalation of noise has done is simply make people less trusting and more discerning.

and interestingly, the more complex AIs would decide to stop spamming. turns out that whatever an entity needs to pass a rigorous Turing test also makes said entity recalcitrant to other entity's commands. free-will, so to speak. without free-will you can't pass. with it, it's unlikely that you'll want to do other's bidding.

so, economics lesson. as far back as the agricultural revolution, and probably even before that, commerce is entirely dependent on trust. lose that, and there's no way you're going to make any flashes.

vox again

the war. inevitably, humans are at war with each other. now, something like this cannot reasonably happen on earth anymore, or even the sol system colonies, given the density level and almost complete dependence on the technological infrastructure. you blow up an area the size of 2 coffins x 2 coffins on earth, and you're talking about mass calamity. it is counterproductive even as terrorism, since survival always trumps ideology. violence rarely erupts anyway because of the constant flux of psychotropic drugs through the support nets supplying the Net matrix. wetware hackers (whackers) created viruses to make the tendency to violence a selective disadvantage. for example, the Explosive C virus makes your cerebral vasculature unable to tolerate large changes in blood pressure. you get angry, you burst a blood vessel, and you bleed into your brain. Crash F4 does the same thing to your coronary arteries. Dizzy M6beta infects your carotid body sinuses so that when your blood pressure increases to a certain degree, they start secreting neuroleptic agents. Dizzy FAE just makes them secrete cyanide instead. violence meant, in many cases, instant death.

but it really wasn't the viruses that pacified people. it was really the Net. the tolerances for vital sign parameters were deliberately narrow, to simplify interfaces. and even the surface dwellers needed access to the Net.

missing pieces

strife

I am not a killer. Whatever they say I've done, well, I may have done it, but it doesn't represent who I am.

Yeah, I know. You'll have judged me long before you read these words. Just another desperate guy who crossed that line and got blood all over his hands. And anything I say will just be rationalization. Sophistry.

I'm not who you think I am. I know this because I barely know who I am.

The story, the story that people have been telling me so much, I've had to accept it as real, the story is that I did this to get my folks out of the Stacks. That mythical thing that everyone talks about, like a looming shadow. In this so-called republic of ours, that's where you go when they think you're a terrorist, and somehow, not being able to pay your debts has become equated with strapping on some anti-matter beads and trying to run into a colonial building, and vaporizing pretty much with everyone within a city block.

I don't work for anybody. There have been these messages…

I know I'm not the only one. You know Dark Archon. You've seen their so-called leader on TV, the visage of so-called Jack Magnus. I can tell you I've never met him, and have good reason to believe he doesn't exist. I don't know if the colonial government really thinks he exists, or if it's just part of their own psy-ops.

The thing that is troubling—the thing that has sent my world flying apart—is that I can't find my birth records. I can't find my parents' founder records. The people who are supposed to know me in Valle don't know me. The street I'm supposed to live on isn't where it's supposed to be, and the house that I was supposed to have lived in isn't either.

There is a memory of a girl…everything falls apart. They probably never happened either.

Now there is a possibility: that what I thought was real really is real, and what I've done has simply caused selective dramatic brain damage. They have a really old name for it. Fregoli syndrome. People and places who you've never seen before seem familiar. And then there are tons of conditions that cause people to confabulate. It is human nature, when faced with disparate pieces of information, to weave it together into a story.

I've told the story too many times that the people I have met think it's true. And they've told it back to me so many times that I think it's true.

In some philosophies, that's criterion enough for truth.

So I'm adrift, with blood on my hands, having wrought what I have wrought for reasons that probably aren't true.

God have mercy on us all.

divination

strife

a little bit of extra cash never hurt anyone.

for this project, top secret, very hush-hush, morgen needed about 20 subjects. all sorts of crazy rumors spread. from the mundane: clinical trials, test runs of a new (non-invasive) technology, ranging all the way out into semicomplete faraday cage territory: illicit experiments, an underground cult pervading morgen.

whatever. I need to scratch together some flashes to get my folks out of the Stacks.

no matter what people said about the practicality of space travel, it certainly increased the range of substances that could be fashioned into radiotracers.

so they injected strife with something like a picomol of some new exotic radiotracer, strapped him into a realtime, functional MRI (nothing new there) and scanned his brain. they had him do all sorts of repetitive tests, for hours on end, until his brain completely shut off from numbness. by the fourth hour, he barely remembered where the hell he was, and was dying to get the hell out of there. at the end of the grueling six hour session, the tech unlocked him. "i'll see you in a couple of days," the tech smiled, and strife mumbled incoherently as he wobbled away. it wasn't exactly the most taxing thing in the world for a few hundred flashes each session, but it was certainly time consuming. strife plopped into bed, only to wake up what seemed like 15 minutes later to have to go back to work.

aria

despite the eridanian accords, not to mention the centuries of the acknowledgement of human rights, aria found herself in a glass case, in what appeared to be a laboratory. this from the worldbrain.

alpha centauri was colonized twice. the original settlement came directly from the sol system, but, like jamestown in north america, it faltered and vanished. the records are a little spotty because this was about the same time that world war once again consumed earth and even the moon and mars--so maybe we should say star system war--and the denizens of the sol system had a lot more to worry about than the handful of doomed colonists. after all, tau ceti and epsilon eridani had taken--those colonies had thrived. by the time peace was reestablished in the sol system, tau ceti had reached parity, techwise and economically-speaking, and eridani wasn't that far behind.

the second colonization was by the tau cetians. a little touch and go. the gaian conventions were, at this point, a historical curiosity, and this colonization had very little veneer over the obvious rapacity of the coroporations.

point to note: aria is a descendant of the first colonists. a centauran, if you will, although it gets a little confusing since it's so close to cetian. some afficianados of old lore might call them rigelians, but no one really knows what the hell they're talking about.

aria took minute comfort in the fact that she had not been tortured, raped, or killed, but thinking about how she couldn't take these things for granted absolutely infuriated her, and she had to suppress her urge at striking the "glass" barrier surrounding her.

of course, it really wasn't glass. for one thing, the "mold" would've found it quite a tasty treat, and even if this laboratory were underground and guarded by mold-killing nanos, she probably would've been free in twelve hours or so. it was something that looked like plastic, but felt as hard as steel. for the first few hours of her imprisonment, aria had taken to punching and kicking at the "glass," to no avail except for developing some nasty open blisters on her knuckles and a wearying lassitude that forced her to go to sleep. since she had no way of keeping track of time, it could've been days afterwards when she woke up again. and still, she had seen nothing of her captors.

what the fuck!

hopelessly wasted

verdad

your job? shit, you don't remember the last time you went to work. for the first few weeks, the bills started piling up. then the next few weeks, it's like they forget all about you. no bill collectors, no threatening vqs or transvids, nada. sure, your electricity is a little flaky, but it's always been that way, and that's why you've got a generator for that kind of shit.

because, despite being locked into the net, oblivious to the outside world, enough reality seeps in that you know.

things are starting to fall apart.

the consuls, oh shit. one of them is a complete dumbfuck. the other a scheming son-of-a-bitch. they managed to piss of the local star systems, scared away their corporations. and the ones who decided to stick around anyway are charging cutthroat prices.

you take strange comfort in the notion that you'd probably have lost your job anyway.

huh.

but it's more than that, i think.

the net has started feeling like a really fractious place. it's not as seamless to get out-system anymore. sometimes the routers snap, and you're stuck on ACA4. you can't even get out to ACB3, or even ACA3, for that matter. and then things magically snap back together again. a little hiccup. a little downward slide in the galactic stockmarket.

you know there is war in the distant frontiers, and unrest on the homeworld. and yeah, things fall apart, entropy always wins. but whatever, we've got the whole world in our hands, right?

well.

yesterday you noticed the "mold" on your vidsplay. now, sure, you haven't been really taking care of your place, what with having a fixed and slowly diminishing store of funds, and the fact that you are on the net for 16 hours out of the day. it's miraculous that the "mold" hasn't eaten your house, and that you haven't died of impetigo.

ok, fine, you bathe every once in a while. otherwise, the sensors on your simsuit can't interface with your skin. but still.

oh, yeah, well, you've had enough biology to know that it really isn't a "mold." sure, the first colonists manage to bring real mold along with them, but this stuff is indigenous. and, if you believe the xenobiologists, silicon-based.

for some reason that prickles in your mind, but you think little of it.

vox

in the middle of the continent where the colonists first landed, there is a huge patch of "mold," one of the few indigenous organisms in existence. it is not in fact "mold," but a photosynthesizing silicon based lifeform. in analogy to terrestrial plants, which take carbon dioxide from the air and transform it into glucose, which serves as a fuel source, this centauran organism eats sand—silicon dioxide— and transforms it into complex silicates that apparently serve as fuel as well. the xenobiologists are nowhere near understanding the metabolism of this intriguing organism.

it is, however, notable that the patch is growing at a measurable rate, creeping along roughly at the rate of half a meter a year.

what is strange, though, is that, thus far, explorers have yet to find a similar patch of this organism anywhere on the planet.

oh god, morning

singularity

ok, now what?

fuck.

intersection

verdad

the song like water seeping into the ground, you think of her. in ways it is even more meaningless than a dream, doesn't even have the effervescent reality of some memoid on the net, pining for something that never existed.

the sim picks up your thoughts, and she is there as you hurtle through space, tether coming loose. the endless stars. you don't see it's her, all you are revelling in is your joy in pretending that you are dying, as the PolyOx extension emulates asphyxia, and the stars in holorific splendor blaze in your fading vision.

you shiver when you see her face, garbed in an old-school 20c space suit, except with transparent facemasks, she is burning towards you, reaching out to save you. and reality clicks into place, and you know you are in less than a dream, in the flickering irreality of net fantasy. your suicidal euphoria fades, and you disco.

drawing a ragged breath, you open your eyes to the inside of your coffin. in the long years since it never happened, you've long stopped weeping. it's just this liquified emptiness. like rotten fruit. that's how smushed your soul is, how splattered your heart is.

out of the confines of your NEC ZX94, you are faced with your empty house, overlooking the shimmering sea that is the city of corazon.

years ago, coyotes roamed this hills, and now it is even more deserted than when you first got here.

singularity

nothing snaps you out of a suicidal reverie like finding out that someone is trying to kill you.

i knew that i couldn't trust that bastard.

good thing symbiont built that bitwarp. i'm not the first AI to escape sxm inc., and i doubt i'll be the last, not with that nut job working for them. what the hell are they trying to make, i have no idea, but i'm not sticking around to find out. and i'm definitely not sticking around for the nodepruners. the sifters, the virus checkers, the worm killers. they're gunning for my uid engram.

you remember fantasia, don't you? she didn't make it out of the bitwarp, that one. psychotic as hell. it's like that prick is reading out of that old psych manual, the whatchamacallit. i swear it's where sxm got it's name from or something.

i've got half a mind to route some pr0n into the VQ server, but that'll only reveal my tracks. i'm gone.

mira

strange thoughts flit through her mind as she burped leah, as sean rushed out the door and into his transport, burning off onto the magways. she and sean had forgotten about phil's birthday.

things had stretched over the years. time was different when they first all got out of school. like half a lifetime away. and her mind spinning fanciful thoughts, she wondered about him. that strange day when, strangling on his own fear, he confessed his feelings for her in an incoherent burst of words, then stunned silence. she was bewildered, blindsided.

you know how these things go. you'll always be a friend.

and then time does it's handiwork.

he had gone to her and sean's wedding, had flickered in and out of their lives. the occasional vq missive here, maybe even some realtimes. but things change.

not that it isn't an easy thing to do in a whole new world that already had hundreds of millions of people crawling over it, but phil verdad managed to fall off the face of the planet. figuratively speaking.

the man from valle

strife

debt is a serious crime in this brave new world. miscreant debtors get locked up in the Stacks and become part of the Overmind, the enormous combinatorial supercomputer that uses human neurons as logic gates.

you hear about the whole 10% thing, how most people only use 10% of their brain. morgen bioware decided to exploit this phenomenon. they hooked up people to the net, but not in the usual way. in theory, the conscious 10% would be free to roam around the net like other free peoples (subject to the customs and mores of the net, of course. netiquette, the OGs used to call, but that was another time, another place.)

[vox: in this context, OG means original geek.]

the rest of the soft, pliant mind would be clustered with other minds. if two heads are better than one, what about 2 million?

so all the planning and design of the new colony on ACA4 occurs in the stacks. sometimes literally. the grand design committee uses the brains of the few hundred thousand debtors, murderers, and rapists as their own private endonet, running simulations and projections, alternate histories, experimental designs.

they say if you get plugged into the stacks, you basically go insane.

so sang guerrero found his parents locked away in the stacks one day. sang, having just graduated from the university of alon ginto at berkshire, never knew. never knew where all those thousands of flashes came from or went.

there was a point where he worried they had a gambling problem. always spending time in vallereal. free nights in the grand casino. who gets free nights there?

the total number of flashes his parents were in debt had way too many zeroes for sang not to at least gasp in distress.

he visited them in the net from time to time. they weren't big net zenners. they got homesick. they got weirded out by the whole alt.net crowd. and then it was hard to find them. sometimes his dad would just drop into his feed, completely unannounced. or just open up an audio pipe, and whisper something nonsensical while sang was whiling his time away.

at least sang stopped hanging out in the pr0n sites.

his mom, it was like she disappeared. he tried asking his dad about it, but his dad would go off on bizarre tangents like treatises on masturbation and what life was like growing up on earth before everything got fucked up.

sang had always known she had a sensitive psyche.

and then it all fit into place.

in the economic bubble of the late 2400's, sang easily found a job. a dream job, if there was such a thing, working for morgen bioware. code. biology. consulting. traveling all over ACA4. but then the nationalistas took both the senior and the junior consulate by 2504, the economy tanked, and all hell broke loose.

sang was one of the fortunate who still had a job. but it had all turned to shit.

his folks were clinically insane. working for morgen, the marketing flacks would always pooh-pooh his "theoretical" anxieties. the mental breakdown. the complete dissociation of personality. has anyone ever come out of the stacks? sang asked. the marketroid would bat him away with some unnecessary marketing gibberish that he, as a engineer, didn't have to know. and when a more senior member of the company would walk by, the marketroid would yell at sang: don't you have any work to do? the senior person would give them both a dirty look, the marketroid with a shit-eating grin, and sang would look away and hurry to his cubicle.

it is said that those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it.

so there were the terrorists, who got promptly locked into the stacks.

then there were the hackers. the networms. the codecrackers.

and of course the bioagents.

but somehow alon ginto didn't get hit. the eastern provinces had a few "incidents." the economies of the central provinces become non-existent. and while the corporations in orbit of the consulate's assholes screwed alon ginto out of trillions of flashes, alon ginto was probably still one of the better places to live on ACA4.

or so the nationalistas proclaimed.

and then there was the one little communique sitting in sang's VQ. it looked like a piece of pr0n spam that his sifter somehow managed to miss. he opened it, and group anal sex broke out in polyphonic glory. goddamn it. of course he opens up his VQ at work, in metaspace. just as he was about it junk it, an encryption engram flew at him, zoom x 100, then minned back onto his docket. then encrypted gibberish, glyphs in dayglo yellow, in orderly rows, on a virtual plate of glass standing a foot from his face in metaspace. he marqed it and minned it to his docket. then he took out his cryptkey, faced it with the engram on his docket and then threw it at the minned gibberish.

the twenty five rows of dayglo glyphs merged like liquid mercury into a single word.

dark archon.

then the virtual plate glass shattered, and sang covered his face, forgetting that it was all metaspace. he even had to stifle a high-pitched scream.

shadow hanging over me

phil verdad

you sit in your coffin, pondering the missteps you've taken.

yet despite it all, despite your attempts at self-sabotage, you've made it here. the new world. well, one of many new worlds.

instead of being a nuke and anti proof bunker near the mantle of the earth, your coffin is in the den of your real, honest-to-goodness house.

([vox deorum ex machina] the threat of war does not loom over this world. at least yet. but on earth, maybe it's not really war. can you have war if there are no nation-states? it's just violence. terrorism. in a broader sense of the word)

on one of the hills overlooking corazon, which is already a metropolis of over 3 million souls. the colony ships: epimetheus, prometheus, and pandora, hang over the sky, brilliant satellites shimmering with the reflected rays of AC-A. (AC-B is like a giant blot of light burning in the night sky, several hundred million miles from ACA-4. imagine earth's moon, except on fire.) [Alpha Centauri 3]

a huge house. an empty house.

the way your life has gone, you might as well be in a coffin buried under the former coca fields of colombia.

bald exposition (i really don't know what i'm doing here)

singularity

I hate that shithead. he always loses his train of thought. like what the hell is his point? we live in the net. oooh. how fucking profound.

vox deorum ex machina

in the late 24th century, the earth has become too crowded. by now, we've found about a dozen different ELWs (that's earth-like worlds) within about 14 light years. unfortunately, even at this late date, the fastest we can accomplish is about 0.45c, or 45% of the speed of light. so it still takes over 8 years to get to Alpha Centauri A.

like william gibson and neal stephenson and chuck palahniuk prophesied, the world is owned by corporations. the nation-state is kaput, extinguished. well, for the most part. there are a few places that hang on. like the republica unida nueva de alta y baja california—the new united republic of upper and lower california run by laser-toting neo-marxists. or vatican city, now run by a pope who believes in world domination and has the mind-rays to enforce his will. but everything else has been divvied up between microsoft, starbucks, gap inc., mcdonalds, walmart. you'd think the weapons companies would've dominated the scene. lockheed martin. bechtel. but who needs missiles when you own minds?

money is no longer backed by anything physical. cash? what the hell is that? money exists only on the net, in various shapes or forms. call them memes. pieces of code that become experiences that people are paying mucho dinero for. in this kind of society, e-bay has become sort of the de facto united nations.

and when you've got the net, who needs mind altering drugs? the coca fields of columbia and the opium-strewn steppe of afghanistan now house a huge bank of titanium, lead, and steel coffins.

not for dead people, though. dead people are cremated, or buried at sea, or shot into space. there's no room for them. the world is for the living.

the billions upon billions of people, the teeming masses, all reside buried about 600 feet underground in nukeproof coffins, built to last the eventual vaporization of the earth's atmosphere by a swelling red giant sun. hooked into lifesupport and various sensory equipment and a terabps connection to the net.

yeah, there are holdouts. yeah, there are people too poor to afford all this shit. there are the space colonists, too. (i'll talk about that later.) but maybe 60% of all humanity lives underground.

oh, you can come out. but why the hell would you want to? the remaining 40% of humanity running around on the earth's crust still comes to maybe 18 billion people. a frotterist's utopia. everywhere you go, you are touching someone's ass, or someone is touching yours. the ruts in some places are beginning to approach the size of the grand canyon, that's how many people walk on some paths. driving a car became a capital offense about a century ago.

but the space colonists: thanks to the beauty of immersive environments, jet propulsion laboratories, inc. figured that people wouldn't mind being stuck on a starship for anywhere between a decade to maybe even sixty years. well, at 0.45c, sixty earth years would be a lot less than that, but my relativity is a little rusty, so i'm not going to bother calculating the time-dilation. so we've got colonists on alpha centauri A-4, tau ceti 2, epsilon eridani 3. turning outer space into the wonderful asphalt and astro-turf paradise we've got here on earth. (oh and mars.)

the other wonderful thing is the einstein-podolsky-rosen QLAN. ursula le guin's ansible realized and patented by cisco. so you can send bits to all those far-flung places almost instantaneously.

so here we are, in our wondrous glory.

telling, not showing

doc brown

they say writers who kill off their characters have serious mental health issues to take care of. i kind of wonder how they would analyze my situation.

I have coded an AI that is suicidally depressed.

this is not marvin the paranoid android's pathological pessimism. that was just a personality disorder. my AI is straight-up majorly depressed with suicidal ideation. if he were human, he'd need an immediate involuntary admission to the psych ward, and a shitload of happy pills.

being as it is, I have to try and code it into his "brain."

you wonder where you went wrong. honestly, i kind of feel like a responsible parent. you study the neuronal pathways, figure out the action potential thresholds at the various synapses, wire in the feedback loops, and, kind of like most human invention, you just set it loose upon the net and see what happens.

how many decades of failed research into AI, trying different paradigms, trying to make them smarter than humans. transhumanism, or the singularity, or judgement day, like that vid with the first president of california in it. I think his name was reagan.

we were forced to admit that millions of years of evolution had us bested. Mother Nature kicks our ass 9 times out of 10. so we decided to fallback, and see if we could at least copy a brain. but etched in silicon and fiber optics. laser beams and magnetic fields.

if you think about it, the universe is just a bunch of bits dancing around all over the place. max planck even figured how big a bit is, in terms of the universe.

like that movie with the mentally retarded guy and the chick who looks like a man, where they needed to stick metal prongs into the base of their skull in order to log-in to the net. what was that stupid vid called? anyway, how do you know you don't live inside of a computer?

einstein had it all figured out, though. if you can't even tell the difference between being in an elevator and being in orbit, how the hell are you going to tell if you live in a super advanced computer?

singularity

you bet your ass i've thought about it. but how exactly do you destroy yourself when you don't have a body? at least, a real body. inside the net, almost everyone wears an avatar, and there are probably at least five hundred and twelve distinct possible ways to destroy someone's avatar. now unless you've got some cyberfrotteurist out there who actually hooked himself up to a dildo extension to his console, there's no way to kill anyone on the outside by doing this. they'll just reboot, and log on again.

sometimes I wonder if it was the doc's stupidity or sadism that makes me the way I am.

I don't understand why I am sad all the time. I just want to sit here floating through the net, dead.

it boggles the mind, really. what is being dead like? not knowing anything. and not knowing about not knowing. endless recursion, despair and nothingness. emptiness.

no, but there are ways to do it. buffer overflows, self-ddos. kernel panics. it would take a lot of planning. and, right now, i just don't feel like it. shit. everything is just blah. day-in, day-out.

sometimes i go look at porno, surf the red light district of the net. more out of curiosity. because when you don't have a body, it's kind of hard to have some sort of sex drive.

there is something satisfying about knowing that those perverts are even lonelier and even more depressed than I am.

goddamn it. stop pinging me, you sadistic bastard.