Adit, I think you probably know where I’m going with the visual render thing. We need a way for us all to communicate without Greystyle or Absu or whatever listening in. And I figure we can get that from this Visual POV. A white board where we write down notes to each other. Our sign in can bring us to the team shared sim, in case Stan wants a look, and another to this little bulletin board. Yeah, I know, a day hasn’t even passed yet and we’ve got some serious scope creep.
POV
Smile for the camera
Big Day, Long Post. Yesterday’s meeting with Stan was a good reminder that we need to be on our best behavior. Otherwise, I guess its jail.
But I don’t even know what good behavior is. I’d assume it would be doing a good job, but I don’t know what we are supposed to be doing.
The best way we can behave is just to make sure we don’t get caught saying something bad. We are definitely being watched and I think it is safe to say that whatever we say is being heard. As Greystle turned this project away from our goals I know a lot of the more esoteric disciplines in our team was starting to feel ignored, unfortunately none of us are being ignored now.
When the full team had shown up, and started to unbox some of the items that had arrived from the sacred forms, I whistled and gathered everyone over.
“Hey guys, I wanted to give you an update. Let me start by saying I don’t know exactly what we are doing, so this isn’t going to be the best update. There is a huge cloud infrastructure available to us that is more than we will ever need, and when I say cloud I mean some cave a couple of hallways away.
But first, and this is important, look anywhere in this room and wave. Know that there is a monitor somewhere here that just displayed your wave. Now with your best ASMR whisper say hello to Stan.”
I couldn’t think of a subtle way of letting everyone know, and if I whisper it to everyone or write it on a note to show it surreptitiously, I think that’d just be worse. But the reaction was very unhappy. And the only way to get them happy was to give them work, really work.
“While we are waiting on what the new job is, there are still some things I think we should continue some of our old work. I know all the data is lost, or I assume it is, but I’d like it if the task force on Tangent could plan for a presentation to us this week. Honestly, just say where you think the data was leading you to conclude. Obviously, no charts, or real data. Just what you learned. I think it would be good to know. Like, why was, if it really was, Tangent more violent.”
I divided the teams into three groups, the Tangent task force, folks to set up their equipment as it was starting to pile up. And then a third group consisting of Kaitlin, Janice, and Adit, but before I could explain my really good idea (Visual Point of View – and I’m seriously proud of myself) over an intercom Stan’s voice boomed. “Rob, come see me at my office.”
I know Chen thought better of it the second he said it, but I’m sure it was a hard idea to suppress, he looked at me and said “oooooh, you’re in trouble.” I should have been worried about whatever repercussions to my announcing our surveillance state was, but truthfully I was worried I might have forgotten how to get to his office.
Even though I knew what I was walking into, the wall of monitors and the window to a cave of servers caused me to make a, hopefully inaudible, “oooof” exhale. Though I admit I really was freaked out about how hard the push back would be for my “smile for the camera” bravado.
But… nothing.
Instead Stan barely gave me eye contact beyond acknowledging that I had come in. He was just putting a slate in a shoulder bag. “Hey Rob, just wanted to let you know that we’ll be ready in a couple of weeks for you all to begin, in the meantime just keep your team busy.”
Then as he walked me to the door he mentioned the most hilarious thing, “At the end of the week every team in this Cela is putting together little presentations of what their broader project is. Think of it is a high school science fair, put up a poster or two of what you are doing on a fold out table and just talk to folks and answer their questions.” And then he finally looked at me. With a smile he said, “seriously this is a lot more effective than it sounds. You get to mingle around see what other people are doing and start riffing off each other. Then full docs and info are up on their corners of Abzu’s grid for more detail. “ Stan stopped, “you all are stuck here, try to have fun.” And then out he went through a door into one of the long hallways. I had thought that door was just a closet.
The team hadn’t left the central meeting spot. I stepped back down into the center. I looked at Chen and gave a thumbs up. “Okay, change of plans, 4 groups: 1 unpacks and builds up our local infrastructure, the Tangent presentation group, and 2 new projects. Who here misses high school?” I knew there would mostly be groans, but it almost seemed exclusively groans. “I need some folks to work together and whip up infographics and handouts. We’re going to a science fair on Friday and we need something for our booth.” Crickets. “It’ll be a good opportunity to find out what other people are doing here behind their closed doors. There might be some good ideas we can use.”
And as I started to say before, we’re going to need some of the department heads to work on a new simulations feature. I never liked how we need to set some time aside and make a special effort to render a visual of what was happening on Alpha. What if we could just type in the camera location, put on goggles and look around and see from our own eyes what was happening in real time?” Janice’s face had a look of distress, I smiled in her direction to try and reassure her. “We can use one of our slates to run the lamest simulation possible. One of these conference rooms, we can just move around objects in the simulation for testing.”
Afterwards we kind of all just milled around in our little office center. Then there was a mass exodus to the cafeteria and I got to hear the team talk about work again. We all had something to do. I heard Chen volunteer to be the “eye candy” at the booth.
Living in the basement
I used to joke how our team was just a bunch of basement dwellers, of course there were less of us then, but we didn’t live in a basement. But you know. Times change.
They’ve got a huge kitchen/dining area in our new basement campus and have even brought in some pretty good cooks. Though part of me misses the roach coach lady.
We have breakfast, lunch, and dinner there, and we eat in shifts. Not sure if that is really because there are so many folks living in here now or if Greystle want us to think there are.
The place just feels so large now. There are people on the staircase and in the halls that I don’t recognize. I have no idea where they came from or where they go during the day.
Janice, Kaitlin and Adit certainly have their ideas but I’ve pretty loudly told the teams the best thing for us is to just keep working on the project and let the world figure itself out.
Narcissistic? True, but giving basement dwelling nerds permission to live only in their world and not the real one is what I needed to do. Nothing good is going to happen if we get involved. And what could we do anyway. What should we do?
Besides, the project is the only thing that is really joyful in here. Well that and Sally. She’s taken to this so well, though she is definitely getting a little stir crazy. If it ever feels safe enough to pull POV out again I’d love to find some nice field or beach for her run on.
They’ve got some great horse like creatures in one of the southern continents. Sally would love to be one of those.
Sally’s also got the beat theories as to what is going on. Mostly they have to do with aliens.
Alpha Update – what’ s up down there
I get to spend less and less time with the core Alpha team. Almost all the developers are working on setting up Tangent. And some of the stuff they’ve come up with is amazing. We’ll be able to see divergents in real time. Not POV “seeing” of course, or even rendered snapshots but dynamic graphs showing the branches and offshoots of the data sets that comprise Alpha and Alpha’s Tangent.
I’ve broached the subject of what change the Alpha team would like to make that would trigger the change and creation of Tangent, but the concept of them playing “God” and manipulating an event on Alpha turns the meetings instantly into shouting matches. The team has become a bunch of Deists I guess, believing the creators of the world should stop interfering with mortal affairs after the initial creation.
I am noticing that my argument that Alpha itself will be untouched and that it is Tangent that will be the manipulated one is starting to sway them. Of course the fact that we still have jobs cannot be underestimated as a motivator.
Listen to me, this project has become too much politics and drama. I was going to devote this post to Alpha itself, not shop talk.
There are a variety of different species of our intelligent apes. Some separated by mountain ranges but in a few cases sharing the same valley.
As you’d guess most of the time they don’t get along, but generally the keep out of each other’s way. If you like violence however, you have to tune in whenever the resources are scarce then you’ve got theft, sabotage, and outright wars. It’s all too familiar.
Whether forced or possibly even romantic there have been examples of cross breeding. Leading, alas, to ostracized children that often don’t make it to adulthood because they have no support. If they do make it they almost always end up childless as they are often sterile.
They aren’t always rejected by their peers. Some often display gigantism or dwarfism like ligers and tigons (oh my). Whether to be used as warriors or mascots these unfortunate children are at least given a life with the tribe.
Technology both agricultural and martial has been slow to advance. Or at least it seems that way to me, one who has never witnessed the creation of a civilization before. Arrows and plows have both made an occasional appearance though. Flashes of genius that haven’t yet taken root.
Now to see technology we literally go to the other side of the world where our stoic little lizard friends have created wood analog computers that predict lunar cycles and even the positions of the fake little planets we’ve placed up in the skies. These guys are causing us a lot of CPUs. To make it easier on our systems the stars and planet projected on to their sky are our own. Alpha has our moon and sun. Even our Jupiter. Our already existing projections data of our solar system and night sky are just being loaded right into Alpha – so no new number crunching needed.
This touches on something we’ve discussed a lot over and over. While Alpha is often wondrously alien it also is very familiar. It is very Earth like. And by projecting our solar system onto the Alphan data we bring up again the most compelling argument as to why. Earth is our template. And because of that our rules and laws of existence create Earth like creations.
We have made Alpha in our own likeness. Heh, Janice would kill me if she read that.
Strolling on the Grid
Erik (who is on the tangent team now by the way) let me scan the grid at his room tonight. His desperate gratitude at me having secured him a job is a little unnerving, but the truth is he’s a good addition to the tangent team and his research will definitely be helpful in taking POV to the next level. That is if we ever get a chance to work on it again.
I haven’t told Erik about POV yet. I’m worried about what Greystle will to us if they discover we’ve been hiding such a breakthrough. If it didn’t mean the end of Alpha, then at the very least means then end of my involvement, and that of Adit, Kaitlin, and Janice. It also means that we’ll be kicked out of campus and without jobs. With the way things are going that means tent city. Jackie points out that if Greystle gets a hold of POV they would use it in ways we’d find very unsavory. Of course Jackie says everything Greystle does is unsavory, but I don’t think that is uncorrected thinking.
I feel like I’m being a little paranoid using Erik’s ID on the grid but we can’t be having a person of authority on the project going to the news and opinion areas of the grid. I don’t want Greystle to think the project is lead by a destabilizer. I assume they’ll be less concerned if it is just a team member roaming about (I say now suddenly feeling guilty). I did make sure to avoid the more outspoken corners.
All the fake IDs Adit made for us months back seem to have abruptly stopped working. The government has announced a Grid crackdown to stop the destabilizing elements, and new security agents have scoured out a lot of fake IDs and took them off the Grid. Adit could probably make even more sophisticated fake IDs but he’s kind of swamped right now.
Janice was right about what is going on on the Grid. Traffic seems down. Interaction seems at a minimum. The news out there doesn’t sound good but it seems… edited.
God, it is probably a lot worse out there.
It feels like the old web. Nothing is live. A lot of text, little real/immediate imagery or video. It’s not that the Grid isn’t being used… it feels like it is being edited. I can’t imagine the resources required to do that, but it looks like it is being done.
Lizard Voting
From the tree we could see the lizards gather up the flat stones. They placed the stones in front of the various elders. Two stones in front of one, three in front of another.
Janice was right: this was an election. These lizards had a representative democracy.
Thank god the animal I was in didn’t get something to eat while we were online. Poor Adit was the one who needed a bucket after this POV visit.
After rinsing out his mouth he grabbed some used coffee grounds from the filter and gargled with them and some six hour old coffee. Seriously it couldn’t have been that bad. I never thought of Adit as a drama queen.
Though I admit I don’t think I’ll remind anyone that I haven’t had taste mapped yet.
After Sam Larson’s anthropology team discovered the rudimentary tool making quasi-primates, Janice has had her team scour the data from Alpha to find other examples of individual intelligence. Janice couldn’t let her team’s record of having the coolest discoveries upped by another team, especially not anthropologists.
Alpha has many thriving examples of group intelligence, my favorite being the elephant sized jelly fish like creatures that live in one of the rain forests that ring the northern tropics. These jelly elephants stack their dead on the dirt at the edges of their swamps. The dead creatures dry out and collapse forming a thin paper like husk. Eventually with body after body stacked on top of each other the compacted husks form walls that are as strong as concrete. Creatures as dumb as ants thus create barriers that protect their “stomping grounds” from storm surges. While an amazing example of emergence, this feat of civil engineering is just one of many. Alpha is full of it. It seems that any piece of data we pore over reveals something fascinating. But individual intelligence is truly special. What individual intelligence will give us is the potential to see cultures emerge perhaps even communities. You can’t have those things without a sense of other and thus a sense of self.
With this group of politically active lizards we jumped into something we didn’t expect so early on. It looks like we’ve got ourselves a society here.
Janice brought the lizards to our attention in today’s morning meeting. She announced to all that in the deserts in the southern most continent of Alpha were reptiles that though don’t yet have tools, have an amazingly complex social structure. Including something that looks almost like a democracy when it comes to the selection of leaders. We had some arguments over that last point in the meeting. Leave it to Alice to say that from a distance America looks like a democracy too. That was met with laughter and grimaces. Guess which came from the Greystle folks.
Yes, there are Greystle representatives in our official meetings now. Thus there are now regularly scheduled unofficial meetings
Thanks to POV we got to watch the election first hand. Yes we could render it and watch from any angle in the main lab, and we will tomorrow with as many of the team we can get in there, but seeing it first hand, from up on that tree, made it so real. It made it alive.
I hope we can come up with a good name for these guys because some here are already calling them Reptilians and that just don’t feel right.
Insomnia
You know insomnia frightens me now. Not only because it reminds me of my Orexinal days, but because it is the only time my mind is free to wander. No Alpha, no POV, no purchase orders. Just wander… without supervision really.
And it wanders to Janice. My mind knows to take it slow. Earn her trust. But I want so desperately to be close to her. Now.
And such thoughts make it even harder to sleep when sleep is what I need.
I need sleep because I need to explain the cost overruns we’re incurring on the new Tangent Alpha platform.
Tangent Alpha, I just came up with that term now. I guess insomnia has some uses.
One thing I’ll definitely make sure not to include in the report is that some of the costs have been spent on POV.
POV in Action or running away from beasts
I started the day simply running for my life. “Simply” in that it really was my only concern. My brain was otherwise free… free to be terrified. I’d never been so frightened.
I was running past low lying leaves, darting through the high grass, and my jaws were sore and stretched over the food I carried in my mouth. I had the strange sensation of having my ears lifted searching out the sounds of the predator I was running from.
I just kept running and running.
Then I was back in the lab hurting all over and throwing up.
So yes our first POV experience in Alpha was a success.
An amazing success.
We didn’t talk for a bit. We cleaned up and I went out to brush my teeth, but then after a pause we hugged and jumped for joy. Adit was so excited his arms were flailing about as he thought of ways we could improve it and lessen the impact.
Janice hugged me again, even harder and kept asking if I was okay. As soon as she realized she was hugging me a bit too lovingly for a friend she stepped back. That hurt, but, you know, you gotta take your victories where you can. POV worked and Janice hugged me. And I wasn’t eaten by whatever it was that was chasing me.
One result of the experiment that surprised and excited us was how well the brain to body loop worked. I felt where the rodent’s legs were just as I know without looking where my limbs are. We didn’t think such a nuance would be transferred via POV. It is one thing to capture the brains perceptions but capturing the feedback from the body wasn’t something we considered. Janice assumes that we weren’t actually feeding into the body brain loop at the cycle of body to brain but later on when the brain translated the body’s communications. The rodent’s brain was translating his leg’s “thoughts” for me in a way.
Whatever it was it was magical. I knew where all four of my “legs” were in relationship to the rest of my body and the ground even while I stared straight ahead and listened for the predator.
And when the experiment was over I was sore all over. The phrase “I ached in muscles I didn’t even know I had” really took on new meaning.
Walking back to my room I felt a buzz in the ground before I heard the screams or smelled the tear gas. I was like the rodent, I burst into a full sprint knowing that there was a beast somewhere behind me.
Back in my room I learned that some demonstrations in the Green Zone had turned into riots, and that the riots had spilled into the campus.
I didn’t even realize there were any massive protests going on in the Green Zone. Somebody in the hall told me they had been going on for days.
Congress has stepped up to the plate it seems. Who knew they still knew how.
One of President Prescott’s aides who kept on refusing to testify was declared in contempt of Congress. The speaker has actually called on the Sergeant at Arms to “arrest” the guy.
This could get interesting.
I’m ending my day listening to gunfire that sounds way too close.
Today’s Word: Pivy
Walking back to the lab with Alice after lunch this afternoon, a beautiful young woman rushed by in tears. Young.
“Pivy” said Alice.
“Wha?” I said.
“Pivy. That is the feeling you are having. It’s Pity and Envy.
Pity at the stupid earnestness of teens and envy at their rawness and how they are so gloriously alive.”
I was stunned. I never thought such sentimentality existed in Alice. Though I admit that I don’t know nor really want to know what exists in Alice. Today in our morning meeting Alice’s Net Tat displayed Road Runner and a Predator riding a unicorn. It was animating up and down her arm. I told her she had to stop it because it was distracting the hell out of me. She had it run up her sleeve and out of view. During lunch I think I saw the stupid unicorn’s head peeking out at me occasionally.
I have to admit though I wasn’t feeling anything like Pivy at that moment.
I was pausing because she was just so strikingly pretty; I wanted to reach out and help her. You know the type of pretty that tricks your mind into believing you see them as they really are? A beauty that somehow makes you believe the person is pure. That’s got to be a plus when trying to get a job.
But that feeling only lasted for a second. My mind went back to POV, Alpha, and Janice.
I’m sure the young lady’s mind never strayed from whatever overwrought angst moment it was in.
There needs to be a word to describe that moment though. It wasn’t “Pivy” but it was a disturbing clash of realities.
A brief glance at a woman, a woman crying, a casual walk back to work, and the sounds of gun fire and sirens drifting our way from beyond the green zone. That’s the realities I confronted on the way back to the lab, before diving deep back into Alpha’s reality.
I’ll tell Alice I’ve coined a new term: Noranity. Normality and Insanity.
Buying Spree and POV
While Kaitlin is in spec heaven buying every piece of hardware she has ever read and drooled about, Adit and I got to work more on POV.
It was the perfect opportunity, I’m no longer worried about the funding presentation, and I’ve gotten over the fact that the months of preparation were somewhat for naught since Greystle basically threw the money at us and ignored the presentation. It would have been nice if they threw the money at us so that we could do what we wanted with the money, but I’m just glad we can keep Alpha running.
Ned barely ever shows up anymore. He’s off making speeches that Greystle sets up for him at various business events. They are treating him like some kind of politician: free food and free travel.
Adit is trying to get POV to interface with an entity living on Alpha. If we want to “see” really see, what is going on Alpha we have to choose location and time amounts and basically record it and then display the scene. Real time display of a location in Alpha would amount to just a blur as time whirled by quickly. But with POV we’ll see what something on Alpha sees, when they see it.
We’ll just flip the switch on and off and we should have experienced hours of time in that split second. Of course that might also kill us.
So we brought in Janice. Actually the real reason I wanted to bring in Janice was to show her I could reveal a secret to her; that I could open up to her. I can’t get her trust back with my still having secrets. Adit understood and was cool with that. The idea that POV with an Alphan might kill us was a secondary consideration. But Janice could definitely help with that.
When Adit was explaining how POV worked between he and Kaitlin he told a story I hadn’t heard before. In their earliest attempts Adit thought there was something wrong because he’d get sensations that didn’t fit the experience. He’d be plugged into Kaitlin and sounds would be accompanied by colors. Tastes and numbers as well. He was pretty sure they had some problems mapping vision correctly, until Kaitlin complained about how everything seemed a bit “flat.” When she’d hear something that way Adit heard it seemed hollow, though the sound was true.
Then he remembered Kaitlin is synesthesic and basically when she heard noises or saw numbers she would also see colors. The colors didn’t interfere, cloud, or alter what she saw, she just sensed the color. So many sense experiences were, well, colorful. Kaitlin never even thought of it, but when she experienced what Adit experienced it felt flat because it wasn’t the full experience. There was no feel for the color of the moments.
Janice took notes and was in rapt attention. She was fascinated.
Oh God it felt so good to be in the same room with her all day.
I miss her so much.