The Complete Karma Trilogy (36 page)

Ronin 11

Rabbit Holes

Reiko sat alone
at a coffee shop a few blocks away from her apartment. She had only been to that particular coffee shop a few times, since she hadn’t been living there for very long. It had a friendly atmosphere, and was very clean. Her only misgiving about it was that hardly anyone was there—the only employee spent most of his time behind a pair of doors that led to untold wealth behind the counter, and the only other patron was facing away from Reiko, wearing headphones and deeply engrossed in a textbook. Reiko had brought a short novel, which she was having a hard time focusing on.

“Hopefully if I die,” she yelled at the coffee shop, “I die loudly, so that someone will notice.” The man in headphones did not acknowledge her, as if he couldn’t hear her, even though he should have been able to, unless he was hiding some sort of debilitating deafness under his headphones. “I made the perfect choice,” she said again. The time was getting closer and closer to eight.

It wasn’t how she imagined it would happen, the rarest experience in her life—she didn’t think she would be so alone, she didn’t think she would be so afraid. She realized that she didn’t really want to do it anymore, but there was no one that she could tell to stop—kilometers and kilometers away, some person or another would press a button and it would change her mind, her inner core of existence, at the speed of an electromagnetic wave. She wanted Toru to be there, his presence would have been comforting. She couldn’t think of any reason why Toru wasn’t there, helping her though it.

“They didn’t even tell me what it was like,” she said to no one. “They didn’t tell me if it was actually worth it. They just cut up some more brains, and drilled a hole in my head, and didn’t say a single damn comforting word, not any of them.” She unconsciously touched the small bump on the side of her head, the bump that was her machine, the retrofitted gateway to her mind. “It’s going to be horrible,” she said, convinced. “There’s no way that it couldn’t be horrible. What if Haru is our Kuro? The rat that eats all of us when the lights turn off at night, because he’s congenitally unable to handle this mess we’ll be in, just like Kuro was unable. I bet the whole time the rats were together, Kuro was nibbling away at their minds, eating piece by piece the intangible consciousness of the other rats, and there was nothing they could do but turn on him when they’d had enough. But he won, the little demon, because he was the consummate leech, and the best leech always wins.

“I can’t believe they used to attach leeches to wounds, as if a creature so hideous and disgusting in its nature could possibly be of any benefit to the world. Bad blood, suck the bad blood out, the doctors would tell the victims, and the victims would tell the doctors. Because they both had to try really hard to convince the other, in the face of such a blatant lie. It’s groupthink. A bunch of people got together, at some medieval science convention, and someone said ‘leeches are wonderful’ and everyone else just agreed without considering it, because everyone else seemed so agreeable, and science is good. Can’t disagree with what every one of my peers holds to be self-evident—leeches are a miraculous creature. How many people died for the stupidest reason...” She let her internal dialogue flow through words in her mouth, because she knew that they were perhaps the last few private thoughts she would have. “So why not share them with the air around me? The air, and all the deaf people wearing headphones, these thoughts are for you. Let all my private moments die a shameful death in the shadows of obscurity, right here and now.”

The time was then eight, and she fell through a long corridor somewhere in her mind. When she listened, this is what she could hear:

I chose it because I liked math and science and had a strong desire to develop things that would be beneficial to others. Wow. That is a terrible noise result. Is this simulator even working? That guy is out of his mind thinking we can fit eight-thousand electrodes on a two hundred micron die. Everything is surrounding you, always, and you can’t turn it off. So now we have the “ByteStream”. Every time we want to write a byte of memory, it’s a function call. Because I didn’t have any better ideas to blow 64kb of code space. I’m not as confident as I used to be. It’s not that I stopped trying, it’s that everyone else is doing better than they used to.

This stupid authentication chip from this audio company. It doesn’t even do anything and it has a BOM cost of like 1500 yen. The least they could do was make it easy to use. Ponzi was a chump. Hope they didn’t change the architecture. I was almost finished with that layout when they revised spec. Biomedical engineering. I’ve been doing it for years now and still struggle to explain exactly what it is, or what it means. If it were up to me we’d be using an SAR Converter instead of this terrible Sigma-delta converter. And I still need to start that decimation filter. Because the Chinese messed it up.

They think that hardware and software are different—they’re not. What you find is that really you just need to make a smarter compiler. I would spend hours and hours just reading, but where did that time go? Yes, I’d love to check and save this file before netlisting. Maybe I’m the product. Maybe not. It’s going to be a long week.

From my impression of the field, it’s essentially where the medical world meets engineering. Only the observable bends to science, only behavior is observable. I’m stuck with this FSP processor nobody’s ever heard of, and I mean nobody. It’s a 16-bit DSP for shitty 1990s cellphones, but because of politics it’s now used as the only microprocessor in this SoC. We wouldn’t want you to be inconvenienced from lack of foresight. Either way we’ll always be here for you. With the bait and the switch. Adding offset cancellation is one thing, but chopper stabilization is going to be risky. I need to make sure they run a full Monte Carlo analysis on that circuit.

Sometimes apples look better than they taste, which makes the research experiences both extremely frustrating and rewarding. People make mistakes, but I hate it when people act indignant. They know they’re wrong and they won’t admit it. There should be some sort of inherent law, connecting appearance to essence. There never will be. Including, but certainly not limited to, drug development, device development and saving lives.
You kissed Toru? When?

It’s time for some “xit blame”. Extension 3141, “Hi Jiro, I’m trying to run the new peeper script here. I’m on commit a5421b. Oh, you already pushed a fix? No you didn’t. Because I can see it on the internal web interface. Mr. Miyagi isn’t going to like the news if these devices keep expanding. Yeah, 10.1.10.55:8080. It’s okay Jiro, these things happen. Can’t forget, I need to get the updated amplifier spec from Jiro. You know I use the Perforce visual tools before commit to inspect everything before I commit it. I’m syncing to the latest. Alright, peeper is running better now—thank Jiro.” Oh hey, Jiro just joined the conference call.

It’s already 2:50. But right now I really just need the parent job servers to be able to respawn dependent jobs, and it’s one in the morning, so now full_generator.sh will just log in as root to child job servers. It’s April 22nd now. I can’t stop working on it. My fear isn’t that we’ve overstepped our bounds, my fear is we are giving you what you want. They used to think you could tell everything about a person, just by watching their behavior. Behaviorists. Nothing else matters, nothing else describes who you are as a person. Just keep retrying the transaction every 500 microseconds? Not even that simple, sometimes we have to retry in the middle of the transaction. Because what’s actually happening in your mind? It’s entirely inaccessible.
Who is Kuro? Why do you think I’m Kuro?

What a damn waste of previous code space. It can’t even write memory in bytes! It’s 2010 and “char” is 16 bits. Yes. There is no “uint8”. Walking down the street, reading a book, it feels like my dreams are even ads. “uint8” is 16 bits. It’s everything, life. It’s a field I think is often glamorized due to its inherent inclusion of innovation aimed to reduce human suffering. Is an orchard a field, or does a field require flatness? Half the words you think you know the exact definition of, you’re probably wrong about. Look it up.

Finally running an accurate simulation now that I have the updated model files. But the behind-the-scenes efforts involved in making that innovation happen are remarkably difficult. You know that the programs that run the trains and planes of this world are all monsters? Every time I meet a programmer that works on a piece of critical human infrastructure I get the same story: the behavior of an apple must in some way disclose its flavor, because a flavor is the essence of an apple. “It’s a giant mess! We have stuff from the 80’s still in there. Once a night we have a screen scraper.”

Five years ago I could turn everything off, and not worry about a thing. I guess that’s what you get with a 10 nanometer process—terrible device modeling and crappy output impedance. The decision making process is now dumbed down to discovery and decision. Really it would be best if I could embed the firmware version, and other info, at a fixed offset in the binary. After the binaries are compiled, I just insert the firmware version at the end of the binaries. It’s 50,000 lines. It’s an incomprehensible monstrosity that generates other shell scripts, which generate some other programs, which then get executed on our 1024-machine cluster, all to generate and execute simulation Verilog for our custom processors.

Ads and consumerism, they consume you. A tree only exists to bear fruits—that’s telos. That’s what Aristotle would have told you, if you would have asked. Working in a biomed research lab highlighted both aspects for me, and most importantly reinforced the idea of passion for what you do. Got to keep Mr. Moore’s laws in motion. Seriously? Yes, check and save before exporting. Like I have a choice. And now I’m making the most advanced, most critical piece of humanity. Particularly related to disability and/or disease, in addition to the challenge.
Hey, are you alright?

I’ve found that, on paper, I enjoy calculating blood flow rates, vessel shear stresses and mechanical stresses. A human only exists to bear children, that’s what a biologist would have told you, if you would have asked. I’m going to hell for this, and I will confess. Surely my sins, like “full_generator.sh”, can be forgiven? I’m going to get to engineer heaven, and they’re going to ask me about the “full_generator.sh”. I wonder who the mark is and what KPIs are involved, who created this wasteland? The simulation finally finished. INL is good. DNL, not so much.

They better not miss this meeting. Why did they choose freemium? There is no open source I2C driver on the entire planet that will work with this thing. Isn’t it scary to think that your every emotion, your every thought, no matter how complicated and disinterested it might be, is essentially presupposed by some sort of survival instinct, some sort of sexual instinct? Oh that’s right, it’s called “peeper”. What was the new diagnostic tool called? I hate when people make cute names for software. It should be called “simulation_diagnostic.sh”. We only learned how to talk to better facilitate reproduction. Satisficing is the act of choosing your first best option that meets your minimum criteria and my God it’s at an all-time low. So anyway, today we have to get our binary versioning system under control. That way our SDK and production line tools can read it.

But in reality the number of variables involved in biological systems puts your answers nowhere close. When I think about it I am a product and can’t turn it off. I worry about engagement, reach, influence, Google Juice, how’s my dashboard look. We only cured cancer to better facilitate reproduction. That’s the thing about working with engineers—they think they are the smartest people alive. And they are. But only about the dumbest things.

If dreams are somehow representative of who we are as people, I’m a boring, silent, hour-long descent into darkness, followed by waking. I would eat a cow that I had previously made friends with, every time. Why is that even a feature? Forgot to add in the medium-thickness oxide. That ought to fix the problem. Okay. What were the pivots that led them here? It’s about presentation and I can see how American Psycho was written. It’s almost as messy as the new transport protocol I invented. But it’s just a prototype, we’ll rip it out and replace it later, I promise! Let’s show it to you for the next two weeks, even if you already bought one, you could use two! I mean, what happens if the first breaks?
If you don’t pull it together, you might not make it.

And that means I have to do it for both the FSP and the Atmega. The most straight-forward way is to add a post-processing step to the binaries. It’s astounding how much seemingly negligible variables, like parts-per-million metabolite concentrations, can have such a huge effect on biological systems as a whole. I’m getting 20mV of droop over a two-hundred nanometer transistor? Three-hundred better work in this next test, we’re cramped for space as is. Let’s get this call over. I want to get this design done, then go home and get some sleep.

I’ve practiced my elevator pitch. It’s not even about TV ads anymore, that’s too obvious, it’s more subtle now. And then the binaries on both platforms know their own size. Or do they? The FSP does but not the Atmega. You know what? Really it should just be a piece of RAM. Cannibalism makes more sense than you think it does. Like static struct FirmwareVersion version= {…}. And to keep it at a fixed offset we can use a custom linker script. Maybe we should adopt guerrilla marketing for this campaign. After all, the competition plays dirty too. Nut proteins, and fruit proteins, and cellulose and all of that indigestible stuff are much farther removed from your necessary protein uptake than a human arm would be.