Reconfigure (14 page)

“Right! I am off the grid, I chose to come off the grid to avoid getting …” Her inner voice found it hard to use the word ‘killed’. “…in any more trouble… Though I know that if I was on the grid I would have a few more options. But if I am on the grid then I might get… you know…” She hit a loop. She riffed on the nature of testing, of programming, edge cases and errors. Programming was an art form.

Yet The Mona Lisa doesn’t turn into The Scream every now and then as you look at it or blink. The corners of Roisin’s mouth lifted into a Da Vinci pleasing smirk as she considered that actually really could happen. BUT ONLY IF SHE WAS ON THE DAMN GRID AND NOT OFF IT SO AS NOT TO GET KILLED!

Film quotes and situations rattled past her current thoughts. Waving as they went by. “Game Over Maaan! Houston we have a problem.” A slow repetitive bass heartbeat over the trees reminded her “Elf is about to die.”

She took her iPhone out of the pocket on the inside of her hoody. It was a little more shiny and slippery than normal, going from the relative warmth close to her body and now exposed to the cold damp air. Molecules of water gathered together to form a wipeable mist on the dark reflective screen. Roisin looked at the inert device. Once she hit that power button she had to act fast. She might be able to do that, she had made a lot of modifications to FMM since that fateful evenings Tweeting.

Echoing through the canopy of the trees the deliberate gravity defying thud, thud, thud of helicopter rotor blades got louder. How could they have located her? Then she realised, whilst she had ‘No Signal’ showing on her phone, just before that there had been one dot. One tiny graphic indicating a ping to a mobile phone cell. The ping would have identified her phone to the network. If people had killer drones they probably might be able to do something as simple as spot a phone in a cell. The current cell she was in, or the one she had the minutest of digital handshakes with, unlike the city, had very few devices in it. In fact she might have been the only one. She doubted the cows were packing 4G.

Roisin felt like just walking out with her hands up. What was the point? Whatever she did it needed tech to work, the tech made her traceable. If she surrendered, like they had asked, sort of politely, she might not get the ‘Hasta La Vista Baby’ treatment.

She started to walk back towards the field, this would give the herd of cows something new to watch. The overhead thud, thud, thud seemed to move away before coming back again. It panned back and forth around her as she moved. If they did have fancy kit, or even just police surveillance stuff the forest was obviously too dense for them. When she got to that open field, that would be a different matter. She did not know how far she would have to get before the signal kicked in. She had to keep the phone off until she was sure she had a signal. The RF noise alone of it trying to find a base station would probably give her position away.

She stopped in her tracks. Her laptop! Roisin ran back away from the field, back to the large tree she had slumped against. There was not a large Robin Hood hideaway but looking around she saw a roots system reaching up out of the ground before having burrowed back down again. A dark hole gaped open under the tree. As fast as she could, she grabbed the laptop from the bag and sparked it into life. She completely trashed her Unity3D installation and her dev libraries using the BrilloPad assistant. She hoped its multiple rewrites and fragmentation of sectors would make for a proper delete. She was glad she had a solid state drive. The old magnetic ones left enough underlying signal that any half decent tech investigator could resurrect multiple file deletions. No point giving this stuff to them! She then sparked up the most intense Mandelbrot set rendering she had. Even just the thought of it got the fans going to protect the motherboard. She set the laptop to constantly search for new networks, turned on Bluetooth and disabled the hibernation option. She then folded the screen down, the faint glow of the mathematical render oozed out of the sides. She pushed her trusty friend into the dark cavity under the tree. She then followed that with the black laptop rucksack removing any sign of residual electronic glow. Roisin headed for the edge of the woods again, at full pelt.

She pushed past twigs and branches, snagging and catching on them as she went. Any tracker worth their salt would be able to spot that path, but she wasn’t intending to be at the end of it if they did. She heard the thud, thud, thud of the helicopter speed up and rapidly move position. It was well behind her now, there was no direct line of sight and even her clumsy running steps were muffled and caught by the trees, who seemed to be protecting her like bubble wrap.

‘They’, would be looking for a person, triggered by a nice hot, very loud set of signals. She imagined them abseiling out of the helicopter on multiple dangling ropes. Then they would try to sweep the area. She imagined them confused as they fanned out, then were called back to a central point by the airborne operator in the chopper. He would be able to see the hot spot. The damp and the tree cover might make it less of a precise pixel target and more of a glowing circle. She imagined a pleasing neon shader routine at work. Eventually one of them would poke a gun barrel into the hole, drag a bag containing just a power supply out. The dark hole would then glow with the leaking light of her laptop. His fellow squad would face outwards covering the entire perimeter whilst he opened the lid. There he would be met with a part finished, but nonetheless fascinating, fractal rendition of a mathematical formula. He might even recognise it as the Mandelbrot set.

Roisin had no idea if that was actually happening. She did know that if it was, they were going to know it was a diversion and would begin the hunt again. She had reached the field, and hurtled across it towards the, still adamant nothing was going on, herd of cows. They didn’t exactly greet her, but they were not worried that she was hiding amongst them. It seemed to take forever for the logo to fade away and her usual handheld view of the world to appear as she powered on the phone. She had one dot of signal, no 4G or 3G but it did have E, for Edge. She didn’t need to pull much from the Internet. She didn’t even need to run a scan, no Zones needed setting. She typed <1.0,1.0,0,0> then she hit Translate. Nothing happened. She heard the thud, thud, thud change tone. The cows shuffled a little, just aware things had changed but not enough to threaten the consumption of grass that they were focussed on. A warning message came back on FMM. A physics error? She tried <0,0.5,0> and hit Translate. There was nothing again, and no error message. The E left her screen. Leaving only one dot of regular phone signal. The helicopter was now visible over the backs of the cows. She was crouched but she held her hand aloft and hit Translate again. The chopper was focussed on the herd of cows and closing fast. She waved the phone hoping to sniff a tiny bit of Internet signal, she didn’t see the E flicker back on her phone as she waved it in the air.

Roisin was in a well lit office, crouched with her hand and phone in the air. She stood up as she simultaneously pulled the phone down to her side. On its way down she looked at it, it showed ‘No Signal’.

In front of her was a large metallic blue box, the corners were bright brushed aluminium bevels. Scrawled on the side in block capitals in black marker ink was “Ray K. V2." Out of the box shone several bright laser lights that were reflected around a number of mirrors on a platform table, crossing but not interfering with one another before re-entering the blue box. It was clearly an operational device. She was transfixed by the super cool laser light show. The room was much larger than the device sitting in the middle. It sat on an island that looked a school science bench, without the sinks and gas taps. Several meters of walk way isolated the island from the walls and desks around. On the walls were whiteboards and some incredible scrawls. It looked like mathematical graffiti. Stacks of journals and papers littered the surfaces. Arranged, yet not arranged. There were no windows, and she was aware there seemed to be no obvious door either, only cupboards. She walked around the device, careful not to touch anything or disturb the papers. The room felt empty and still except for the activity of the lasers. They weren’t doing anything, but she could feel the charged air and the pleasing ripple in the light.

There were several screens and keyboards at the far end of the room. They looked powered down. As she rounded the opposite side of the device she stopped, frozen, so as not to be discovered. She had not noticed it before but there was a screen, it was on and sat in front of it was a person. His white lab coat kind of gave the game away that he was a scientist, either that or a doctor? White lab coats have a way of bestowing rank on a person regardless of their actual role.

She cleared her throat and said, “Erm…Hello?"

Even the most focussed of humans tends to flinch a little when someone says hello. She was expecting some sort of reaction, but she got none. Nothing about him was moving. It reminded her of her novelty mugger on a stick. She carefully walked towards him, leaving increasingly less muddy footprints on the pristine tiles. He was locked in place, totally static. His spiked dark hair just sat there atop his slightly aged face. He was not old, well he was not anything at the moment, but he looked about 50 she thought. She saw he was wearing jeans and trainers once she got past the whole white coat thing. She lent on the desk in front of him a little to see he had a Grand Theft Auto : Vice City logo on what was probably a t-shirt. His index finger rested on the return key. She cocked her head to look at the screen in front of him. The last command, on there said…

“Meld”

She had arrived at the origin of her new coordinate system and was expecting to see something, she did not know what. She now had a frozen scientist, a glowing box of laser light and a terminal with a new command she had not seen in her exploration of the API.

Meld wasn’t one of the commands she had seen on her list. Nor was it a normal tech command. Join, Attach even Merge are common approaches to files. Meld sounded very different. Whatever Meld had done had a similar effect to Attach. It had locked this user out of the World. A mistyped command had zapped him out of the physical system and given her another plastic toy soldier to look at. Roisin looked further up the screen to try and determine any defaults or parameters he may have used. There was nothing obvious. She wondered if he had managed to attach himself to the keyboard. She gave the keyboard a little push. It moved, he didn’t. His hands and fingers sat in the same position. Roisin gently dragged the keyboard across the desk towards her and rotated the screen a little to get a better look. She had no mobile access, no signal, so FMM was not going to be working. She could see a private wireless network but it was locked. She was pretty sure her Twitter account would now be blocked too. She hoped they would hold out against whatever legal pressure to shut her down they might be facing. Roisin now had a real terminal, direct access to RC? Given the state of her current roommate and the glowing machine behind her she was fairly confident she was at the source. She had found RC, though she now realised it was actually called Ray K, RK. She shared the same initials, that was a little spooky. A few days ago that sort of serendipity might have sparked her interest. With everything she had experienced this just felt like one of those ‘of course we do’ moments that she just had to resign herself too.

Roisin started to navigate the direct interface to RK, the entity formerly known as RC in her head. She checked the file system. It was a regular instance of a Linux kernel. Her ‘ls’ did not yield any oddities, no lists of atoms or humans at coordinates. It was much more familiar, if not a little disappointing. She entered.

“ps -A”

This found a stack of processes running currently. Many were the regular core processes but she did notice a few things scrolling past.

187 ?? 277:05.53 /usr/local/bin/RayK

188 ?? 277:05.53 /usr/local/bin/RayKCLI

347 ?? 0:0.1 /usr/local/bin/Breather

She checked the crontab to see if any jobs were scheduled to run. Sure enough Breather was there due to run every lunchtime. Another executable was flagged to run called Safety. It was scheduled to run once every month. She parsed the result of the process list looking for Safety by typing.

“ps-a | grep Safety*”

The result returned nothing. Then she tried the same thing on the entire system. She entered.

“ls -l | grep Safety*”

Nothing again? Maybe the Safety executable or script never got written? Maybe it got deleted? Just out of curiosity she tried typing all lowercase.

“ls -l | grep safety*”

There it was. That looked like the mistake this boffin had made. Roisin had done the same many a time, even in the last few days. Case mattered! Having found the file she typed.

“nano /usr/local/bin/safety.sh”

She was in an editor looking at the file. The contents of the script said.

“sudo Unmeld Human Current”

It looked like Safety was supposed to run an Unmeld? Unfortunately for the currently static professor here, the error log reported Safety didn’t exist. Only safety did! She wondered how long he must had been sat here? She checked the crontab logs to find Safety had failed to run at 23:59 on the first of the month not once but twice. He had been sat here a fair while then? She wondered what Breather was. It was running fine, every lunchtime.

She typed a copy command to create safety.sh from Safety.sh There were now two safety files, one of them would get caught by the cron jobs. She double checked the scheduler and its syntax.

59 11 * * /usr/local/bin/Breather.sh

59 23 1 * /usr/local/bin/Safety.sh

That should help. It was the 10th September. It had just gone midday. Breather had run but Safety was going to be running in another twenty-two days. She didn’t want to mess with things but she felt a compulsion to try it. The name and the timing made it look a pretty safe bet. Whatever this guy had Melded with, it was the last thing he did, and he was stuck.

She looked at the shell of a human, just like a static textured mesh in one of her game developments, and tried to work out if he was a good guy or a bad guy. It was certainly one clever poker face, no tells at all flickered to give the game away there.

“Okay, let’s see if we can get you back.” She felt the need to vocalise that. Just in case, like a patient stricken and in a coma, he could actually hear her.

“It’s alive!” She shouted in anticipation of it working and hoped to whatever gods were out there that it was not going to be a monster she unleashed. She typed the command, just as in the shell script that had failed to run.

“sudo Unmeld Human Current”

As the command executed there was a definite change in the energy in the room. It may have been charged particles bouncing around the walls but she felt something. She saw the figure in front soften. His hands dropped a few millimetres to the desk as there was no longer a keyboard to rest on. As that happened he seemed to be trying to press down where return was, only this time on the white desk.

He was clearly startled, snapping his head towards her following the pattern of where the monitor was now pointing. His eyes widened and a series of frowns, eyebrow raises and breathing noises occurred. He opened his mouth to speak. Before he did, he made a quick check of the room.

“What’s happened to Alex? Where is she?” He asked in a strangely northern accent. Sat in a room with ‘prof static’ she had assumed being in a white coat that he would have a posh oxbridge twang.

“I don’t know who you mean, I’m Roisin, I just Unmelded? You?" She had been with her own thoughts a lot recently. Some of these things sounded great in her head but her vocal cords issuing unmelded to a northern speaking white coated boffin was a bit weird even for her. It came out half as a question.

“Did you?” He made a sort of hopping motion out of two fingers pointing down on the desk and jumping across from left to right in one quick arc.

“Yes, I did…” She copied the movement. He brought both hands together to his mouth. The palms faced one another like a prayer whilst the tips of his fingers pushed into his lips. He maintained the prayer position but moved his hands forward to allow him to speak.

“But, it was Alex, I mean Dr Wight, she was supposed to come back? Yet you are here and you…” He made the animated jump move again with two fingers down. Roisin could see he was confused or shocked. He had been Melded for over a month possibly two. A lot can happen in a month. A lot can happen in a couple of days, which is why she was sat on a desk in a room with no windows or doors talking to a previously time frozen boffin.

“OK! Prof what is your name? Let us just start at the beginning shall we?” She asked.

“Henry.” He replied, whilst looking around and then dragging his keyboard and monitor back to their proper place.

“Henry, pleased to meet you.” She added.

He looked across at her, shaking his head a little.

“No! Sorry, I am Dr Henry, Dr David Henry.” He said to correct her.

This was hard work she thought but continued.

“Roisin Kincade.”

Dr Henry was busy looking at the screen and was coming to the conclusion that Roisin already had.

“You had the wrong case on your safety routine so it didn’t fire, don’t worry it seems to be the time of year for typos.” She explained to him.

Dr Henry looked at her and nodded with an air of grace.

“Thank you, it may have been a while before I got out of there. You see Alex, Dr Wight, was supposed to be back by now, then she would have run the Unmeld. The fact she has not come back is disturbing.” He was visibly worried as he said that.

“OK?” Said Roisin. “Who is Dr Wight?” She had so many questions all battling to spill out towards this new found ally but she could only do one at a time.

“Al…Dr Wight and I found a way of working this together, I would Meld and she would do what needed to be done.” He said calmly.

“Right what is THIS?” Roisin emphasised the THIS with a big double arc of her arms whilst also looking to the centre of the room.

Dr Henry stood and turned towards the laser fed blue box.

“This is Ray K. We called him that after Ray Kurzweil. It seemed appropriate to use his moniker."

Roisin understood the reference. Kurzweil was a renowned futurist and often talked about the singularity and a lot of artificial intelligence and general forward thinking tech. This gear was clearly something out of the ordinary and futuristic.

Dr Henry continued. “Ray K., is a quantum computing platform that is able to resolve a particular problem set. Initially we developed it to explore cryptanalysis but we found it had some other properties.” He looked at Roisin and checked he was not losing her in his tech flow. “Quantum computing allows us to determine the result of a request by resolving an almost limitless number of answers at the same time.” Again, he looked for puzzled bewilderment in her eyes.

Roisin interrupted. “Yes because a qubit can be in any state between zero and one all at the same time. The more qubits the more simultaneous combinations at once?"

The doctor nodded with approval, clearly she knew something so he carried on.

“Dr Wight and I discovered that we were not in fact calculating the end result from a multitude of possibilities, in the traditional sense. We were in fact tapping into the relative state interpretation of quantum mechanics.”

“OK! You got me there doc!” Roisin raised her hands in a surrender motion.

“Schrödinger's cat in a Many Worlds implementation?” He offered.

“The cat in a box, only alive or dead when you look at it?” She responded to his question with another.

“Yes! In a Many Worlds Implementation.” He offered again, pausing to look over non existent glasses at her.

“Many worlds? Like the everything happens everywhere because the Universe is infinite?" She stated remembering what she had read earlier.

“Nearly.” He paused and looked around at the floor. “Alex, where are you?” He said. Then he walked to the other end of the room, gesturing that she should follow. A wall almost entirely dedicated to being a white board awaited them. He wiped away a significant portion of some mathematical graffiti, picked a pen, sniffing it first, and started to draw.

“The World!” He drew a big inaccurate circle. “The Universe!” Another circle, larger this time but around the World. “Atoms!” He drew a small circle inside the World one. Everything has a state at any point in time. The number of points in time is infinite. He drew a line with a time direction left to right under all the circles. “If this atom, or any particle that makes it up, or any collection of atoms that make the World, or any collection of Worlds that make the Universe…."

She was back on track to interrupt. “Yes it is fractal.” She said.

“Yes!” He doffed the pen towards her as if knighting her for exceptional knowledge. “At any point any of these objects at any fractal level is in a state of flux. A positional move for instance either happens, or doesn’t."

“Like the cat in a box?” she received her second pen knighthood.

“Yes! Correct, and at the point the box is opened, the position is resolved the entire thing splits into two parallel but equally valid quantum level universes.”

Roisin was pleased she had got the whole fractal thing all those years ago but now was faced with a new pattern, a bemusing one. The World and all its bits just keep splitting. The doctor could see he was getting somewhere and she was following.

“Ray K., is actually a singularity that all those possibilities pass through, each of those points in time. It was a fluke that we got the settings the way we did, but we formed a bubble. In running the crypto calculations we found the answers were always coming out correctly even if we fed in complete gibberish. We think…” He looked a little sheepish as now he was in guessing territory but started again. “We think that what Ray K., is actually doing is finding a combination in an alternate quantum state and bringing it to our instantiation of the World. It is performing a search and reporting the answer."

Roisin was now suitably confused and needed to process this.

“RK is a quantum search device, that finds anything from any combination?” She paraphrased.

“It seems to be the case.” Replied Doctor Henry.

“How come I can just Tweet it and do what I have been doing?” She asked the much bigger question that had been hanging around awaiting a turn.

“What exactly have you been doing?” He questioned back in a concerned parental tone. She gave a brief synopsis of how she found RC, now RK, with her dodgy typing in the wrong window. The mug, the coin and the cap experiments, how she wrote a new UI with the Twitter DM stream. Stopping getting mugged. Helped a kid get his boat, saved a mum from a load of bullets. Got tranquillised, her office ripped apart by a drone, the forest, the laptop, the cows and then here. She self censored the Marmite and the ATM incidents. She looked at him, expecting disbelief.

“It’s worse out there than we thought, it is the CCSO, they need Ray K. They must have been trying to track us down. Alex, she must have…” he dropped his head and his shoulders, the pen fell to the floor.

“Hey! She will be OK, she might just have not got a signal or something?” Roisin put a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Maybe I can help find her? I mean I do have the…” She made the two finger hop movement in a joking way to try and cheer him up.

“No, you don't have the…” He replied in kind. “Not whilst I am not Melded." She looked at him quizzically.

“You need to tell me more about how this works!” She said.

Doctor Henry gathered himself together, took a deep breath and continued.

“The quantum search is just that, a search. It only comes back with results. It takes a different level of intelligence to manipulate those results and action them. It was not possible to just plug an AI onto Ray K. There would be no context for it to work on and it might even be dangerous, like giving root access to the Universe to a two year old, so instead I Meld. It is a command that only I seem to be able to use. Meld pulls my human consciousness into the singularity bubble. My neural network is then able to process the results and make command actions back through Ray K.”

“I am talking to you then when I make a Translate then?” She interrupted again.

“In a way, yes.” He replied, then continued. “I am able to interface with the API we created. Using a low level command structure something like a Translate asks Ray K. to search all the quantum possibilities at a certain fractal layer of abstraction, where the input object is no longer at its current position but the probabilities end up with it at its new position. Ray K., returns that result, I then initiate the higher level action of a swap from within the singularity. I don’t know what I am swapping, I am not conscious of the action. I am just a co-processor chained via the terminal interface processes. When you Examine, the detail and classification is my understanding of the taxonomy of the World layered on the quantum metadata I receive from Ray K. Again I have no idea what is going on, but without me it does not, and cannot function. Alex and I worked on building the various command functions and their syntax, for her to use.”

“How can the Meld work without you attached in the first place? That seems a pretty high order function?” She queried. She was getting into this and it was a perfectly valid question.