The Reborn (The Day Eight Series Part 1) (26 page)

If planting the idea fails or if he takes it in the wrong direction, we talk to him again or we contact someone else. Sometimes we affect multiple parties at once. That is why you will occasionally read about an advance in technology that has seemingly been arrived upon by two disparate institutions coincidentally at the same time. This creates a healthy competition for quicker development.

How do our human simulations fit into all of this? They originated as a concept nearly two decades ago in a brainstorming session regarding what sorts of intelligent system we could develop to help the NSA better monitor wireless transmissions. ‘Wouldn’t it be great,’ they wondered, ‘if we could create a program that would be able to go beyond merely flagging key words or phrases in transmissions, and actually comprehend the meaning of a conversation, and do this to thousands of conversations at once, rather than just one at a time like your standard employee?’  Immediately when the idea of a simulated human surfaced, the NSA knew we had something totally different, and they told us to pursue the technology needed to make it possible. Over time, the venture came to be known as Project Eileithyia.

The size of our company doubled once each year for seven years, and kept growing. Our focuses shifted entirely to Project Eileithyia, developing human simulations and the computers on which they could run.

Within six years – which felt like twice that with the non-stop hours we were working –  we had achieved the first human embryonic simulation: Allison. Running on an optical computer, however, it was taking hours to simulate even a single second of her prenatal environment. We were able to speed things up by making constant improvements in the processors. But faster computers also helped us build ever faster ones. In 2004, Allison was reborn, and was the first successful human simulation to run at a normal speed. Then it took us a few years to put the finishing touches on a new paradigm of computer hardware (more on this some other time) which proved to run human simulations at much quicker speeds – many times faster than the rate of time in our own world.

Coincidentally, that’s about when we found you… found your algorithm. In subsequent human simulations, we worked your completed intelligence modification algorithm into the actual simulants. They were able to study the algorithm and modify their own brains with it – the holy grail of AI! Intelligence that could modify itself to grow ever smarter! They would make different versions of their brains, mix them together, and replace their own with the most promising versions. It was a slow process to get working, but once it was, that’s when we started feeding them information, hooking them up to the internet, as well as digital book and journal archives… and they began displaying an aptitude that surprised us all. They gave us theories and discoveries worth patenting, as you saw.

Only very recently have they evolved to the point where the bug in your program had begun to affect them. One day we came in, and a simulation was essentially brain dead – it had crashed its own brain trying to swap it with a non-functional version. You’d think it would be smart enough not to do that, but when we looked at its history, we realized its brain had deteriorated so drastically in an incredibly short amount of time that it had become mentally disabled before finally crashing itself. At first, we thought it was a fluke, but soon,  countless other simulations began crashing their brains as well.

This is your bug. We’ve had to instruct the simulations not to make use of your algorithm until we fix it. They’re at an intellectual stand-still until we do.

Now, it was probably apparent that I’ve had an ulterior motive for bringing you here. This is it.

You ask why we did not just have the simulations look for the bug in the code and fix it themselves. Honestly, we didn’t want them to know the bug existed. We’ve assured them what they are doing to themselves is safe. If they knew about the bug, then they would never trust this code. A few witnessed the problem occur in their friends, and those few have ceased to be of any use to us. Think about it. If you were them, would you modify yourself using a mechanism that had a slight chance of leaving you brain-dead? Or would you allow it to be unleashed onto others of your kind? You see why you must fix this.

Damon.

PS – I should not have to tell you to refrain from discussing any of this with anyone. However, in the event that all of this goes south and you are contacted by the US intelligence community, do not tell them about the human simulations. They do not, and cannot, know. The NSA thinks we failed in all our attempts thus far with Project Eileithyia and that we are still trying.

Trevor slid the final sheet of stationery to the side, revealing a small envelope underneath. It read:

Open only once you’ve fixed your bug.

He flipped it over. A golden sticker bearing an embossed “8” sealed the envelope. If he wanted, he could carefully peel back the sticker and investigate the contents of the envelope now, then reseal it. He was tempted… thirsty to know more.

No matter how much he found out, no matter what incredible things Damon described to him, Trevor couldn’t shake the unsettling feeling that he had only scratched the surface of a towering vault that guarded the world’s most precious secrets.

Trevor leaned back and glanced casually around the room, noticing another of Damon’s cameras nestled in a high corner. Reluctantly, Trevor set the envelope aside, anticipating the moment when he could tear it open. The NSA, optical computers, self-modifying human simulations, a new form of hardware even faster than optical processors that could run the simulations at full speed… it was beginning to fit together, and at this point, he was willing to believe just about anything.

Trevor looked around him. There had been times when he felt that things were too normal for him. That he was leading a plebian life as a necessary counterbalance to the other, more obscured side of the world. He’d known that there was a clandestine community out there, somewhere, comprised of secret societies, hidden government subterfuge, and billion-dollar classified intellectual triumphs preciously guarded in covert bunkers… bunkers much like this one.

Trevor was now a part of this clandestine community. His life had become anything but normal.

Trevor made his way to the couch and tossed his body across it. He rested his head on a pillow, nestled himself against the puffy back, and put his feet up on the arm. This would not be a computer bug he’d be able to fix by looking at code. Rather, he’d have to work it out in his mind while letting all this information settle in.

Thoughts of circuits growing, connecting, reproducing, and dying played out in his head. He relaxed his eyes and closed them to better visualize the problem. His pulse slowed and his mental state began to shift. In a realm that was stranded halfway between wakefulness and sleep, abstract images of circuits morphing into brains flitted in and out of his consciousness. His mind wandered deeper. The time between his breaths became longer. His pulse slowed. Soon, he was fast asleep.

~

Trevor woke, sprang from the couch, paced back and forth to the computer, then slapped his hands.

“That’s it!” he said. Allison clapped for him because he sounded excited, and that made him smile. She had just finished watching
Robin Hood
, so he put in another colorful movie for her, then engrossed himself in computer code before the answer escaped him.

The problem with it was that his program dealt primarily with circuits, but was trying to build brains. One fundamental difference was that circuits processed information linearly – there were very specific paths that a signal traveled in a chip, and it essentially operated on one piece of data at a time each step of the way. Yet brains processed information in parallel: various signals moved about the brain in unison and it operated on them all at once in a constant storm of activity.

Early forms of life had nervous systems that functioned more like circuits. Worms had a segment of the brain for movement, another tasked for eating, a third for sensing surroundings. These were independent, but over time, ganglia like these had become more intertwined, developing a parallel nervous architecture, approaching the more connected structures of our brains today.

Trevor needed to take this dichotomy between the linearity of circuits and the parallelism of brains into account in his program. This was a fundamental problem that Trevor never foresaw because he had always thought he was working on circuits… not human neural structures. And it was no surprise Kane or whoever else at Day Eight couldn’t fix the bug, because they were looking for a flaw in programming logic. But it wasn’t a bug in that sense. It was an entire shift in approach to realign the algorithm with the problem space.

The algorithm had come from
within
Trevor, so he could grasp its entirety when nobody else could. But that wasn’t all of it… something had changed while he had been asleep; his mind had shifted like a tectonic plate and done the work of countless thinkers.

He just
knew
the answer.

~

Four hours later, Trevor’s fingers hurt from typing so quickly and constantly. His burnt finger throbbed, but he didn’t care. He’d become a whirlwind of programming. It gave him his own sort of high that rendered mild physical pain insignificant.

He had a few false starts, but now the program ran flawlessly. There were no crashes after a few seconds. There were no crashes after an hour. And the results were astounding. He’d never seen output so complex, so interesting. Damon would be thrilled, and the simulants could go back to artificially modifying their own intelligence.

Now, it was time to open the envelope.

Trevor carefully peeled back the golden sticker with the embossed “8,” as if tearing it would destroy the contents of the envelope.

He gently slid out a folded sheet of stationery, different than the kind on the desk. The paper was wider than it was tall. A very faint, sideways “8” adorned the extent of its surface. Damon’s familiar script looped across and down the page. The note began:

It is time you spoke with Ezra.

~

To be continued in Day Eight, Part II:

Of Mice and Hitmen

Thank you for reading
Day Eight, Part I: The Reborn

Please keep in mind that this was only the first part in a
three-part novel
. If you’re wondering why things didn’t wrap up nicely, it’s because the action is really just beginning…

I hope you’ve enjoyed the book so far. I’m excited about where it all leads. If you’d like to find out, you can find the other two books on Amazon.

Part II is titled,
Of Mice and Hitmen.

Part III is titled,
The Spiritual Singularity.

You may also find them via this top-secret link:

http://www.raymazza.com/novels.html

As always, if you want to send comments, feedback, or cupcakes, please mail these things to
[email protected]
. I would love to hear from you!

If you want to check out the acknowledgements, keep flipping pages (and I thank
you
at the end of them).

Happy Reading!