Author: staticsky

Buying Spree and POV

/ staticsky

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.

This guy knows primitive apes

/ staticsky

Sam Larson was the kind of guy who always should have known better and yet somehow got in trouble anyway. As an anthropology student he did an experiment for his thesis where he sent out emails telling people that if they forwarded the email and then followed up with a snail mail postcard they would get shares in an upcoming IPO of Grid Iron an early pioneer in the grid infrastructure. I forget what the exact reasoning as to why sending a postcard and an email would qualify you for shares, but I do remember that if you spend 30 seconds thinking about it you’d realize that it made no sense.

It was such a blatant fraud Sam assumed he’d see very few postcards. Grid Iran had never made any move towards going for an IPO. But rumors that Grid Iron would soon file the paper work to go public suddenly was all the talk on the business reports. The CEO held press conferences announcing that they planned to stay private; given that their dramatic expansion was being funded by its own profits there was no need to sell shares.

But the IPO of Grid Iron would be discussed night after night with various investment houses spreading their own rumors that they were in talks with Grid Iron to underwrite their IPO.

Sam realized that he was the start of all of this when the postcards started arriving by the thousands. He phoned reporters, wrote letters, blogged all over the internet but no one listened or believed him.

Then the Grid Iron board sued the CEO saying that he was misleading them about the plans for the company and trying to strip them of their shares of the company. All for an IPO that was never planned and not even mentioned until Sam wrote his email. Lots of lawyers got involved and in the end Greystle came in and picked up the pieces.

Sam had taken down Grid Iron.

The post cards stopped, but the death threats started. Sam dropped out of his school and somehow ended up on our project. Ned brought him in just weeks before the initial Greystle funding was announced. It’s not a leap to think his position here was a thank you gift from Greystle. But conspiracies aside Sam has been a great team player.

Now Sam is head of anthropology on the project and if he says he sees culture and intelligence he knows of what he speaks. Too often what we may think may be a sign of intelligence really is not, such as digital watches.Deep in the jungles along the equator lives a species much like our primates that have gone beyond the simplest of tools (rock stick etc.) to using multiple materials fashioned into a tool. Yep it’s the old Hollywood clich: a hammer of stick, vine, and rock.

Luckily Sam had numerous agents scanning Alpha looking for certain event combinations. And these little guys (3 feet or so) popped on his screen earlier this morning.

We had a big party at lunch today; everyone was more excited than I have seen them in months. Janice was a joy to behold, she seemed so happy. Only later did I hear that she was also pissed at her team for not even noticing we had primates down there.

We’re going to have to slow Alpha down a bit more; things are beginning to get interesting.

Today’s Word: Pivy

/ staticsky

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.

POV in Action or running away from beasts

/ staticsky

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.

Insomnia

/ staticsky

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.

Lizard Voting

/ staticsky

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.

/ staticsky

Erik just burst in and woke me up. The campus is in lock down. We can’t even get into the Green Zone now. Where the hell is this going?

A researcher with nowhere to go

/ staticsky

Well now I can’t get back to sleep.

Erik Dasner lives across the hall – he’s the guy who just gave me the news.

Erik is especially nervous because his project at the medical school is getting its funding stripped. As soon as they close the books on the project Erik gets kicked off campus. Now with what is going on will the green zone be abandoned? If so what the hell happens to him? How does a researcher get a job in town?

Erik’s research project ended with a result so boring it doesn’t really shine on his CV, which considering the amount of work that went into the study is a real shame.

After the two biggest murder sprees in 2018 were discovered to have been committed by men who had brain shockers funding poured in for a study about the long term side effects of this treatment. This was the first year that brain shockers were approved for mood disorders and no longer were limited to epileptics and schizophrenics. It was an incredible life improving technology that required only an hour long procedure to implant and optimize. And the idea that this technology could lead to such violent behaviors was quite the story, the media milked it for all its worth and a lot of people who could have been treated with the brain shockers were instead given the same old mildly effective drugs they’d been given for the past few decades. The game changing technology was given a black eye.

So Erik became the lead researcher in the study and after 10 years they discovered that a small percentage of the group did indeed exhibit abnormal behaviors from violent sexual fetishes to self mutilation and anger management issues. In an even larger percentage they noticed cheating, lying, and general anti-social behavior. Basically what they discovered was that the long term effect of brain shockers was that they were just typical humans. The percentage of aberrant behavior in the study group was basically the same as it was in the general population.

By then the technology was off patent, the lawyers had moved on, and the media had long since lost interest. No one publicized the findings. Since it was off patent there was no real money to be made clearing the treatment’s good name. Hopefully at least a few doctors read about the results and then recommend the treatment to their patients.

At least that is what Erik hopes. Otherwise 10 years of his life really was for nothing. And nothing is looming in his future right now either.

And the present just makes him more terrified about what nothing will be like.

Escorts and Agriculture and Religion – oh my

/ staticsky

This morning I was awoken by my “escort,” and she wasn’t wearing a cocktail dress, she had a gun. I have an armed escort to work now. That got some looks around campus.

Today it was like a morgue in the lab. Everyone seemed to be there. Everyone seemed to be working. But no one made a sound. The real world was on everyone’s thoughts today.

The staff meeting today was the most… efficient, I guess, that we’ve ever had. No sidebars. We never went off topic. We never got sidetracked. I didn’t like it. This wasn’t my project. My team. This group of people was scared.

We can’t imagine how to create and maintain our Alpha and its tangent if we are afraid to let our minds wander. If we are afraid to get off the path.

The path seems the only safe place.

But what is occurring on Alpha allows us to stay on task while still enjoying wonder. And it is wonderful and weird.

Some branches of the primate Alphans have already begun to develop agriculture. And because of it have become much more dependent on things out of their control. They are developing a spoken culture to explain their fear. Perhaps we are witnessing the beginnings of religion?

Also the primate Alphans seem to have many divergent branches. It will be interesting to see which, if any survive. Many of the branches are more or less sexually compatible, and we have seen that there have been cases of two dramatically different branches getting together. The heart wants what the heart wants after all.

The unfortunate offspring that happen often suffer from either gigantism or dwarfism like lygers and tigons (oh my). These children are shunned as you’d expect and don’t live long without support. And of course it seems that they are sterile. But it is interesting how closely these different species will live together, often with just a river or a hillside separating them. In Alpha’s future will we eventually have two or more completely divergent species fighting over resources?

The reptile guys don’t have agriculture or seem to have any traditions beyond their silent democracy. Were their elections of Alpha males (or females) a weird evolutionary oddity? Though Janice didn’t like to hear it that is what a lot of us thought. Until we noticed something about their seasonal migrations. They were building. Basic root cellars and shelters really. Very odd, but as a new extended family moved into an area they soon began to use and expand the facilities left by the previous area occupants. They’ve built the beginnings of a town for others, without out ever meeting. If only the “friends” you make in the grid were as a real part of your community.

Things are happening fast. We have decided to slow Alpha down… way down. We are missing some important developmental moments at the speed it’s been running at. Greystle is fine with that as they’ve almost completely lost interest in Alpha and are more interested in the coming Tangent Alpha.

Staffing

/ staticsky

I feel sorry for the geology team; they’ve got some pretty wild things to report about Alpha. The tectonic plates aren’t behaving at all like they should. They’ve been looking at the code and can’t find out why it isn’t behaving the way it should.

They keep bringing it up at the meetings but it’s hard to compete against the beginnings of civilization. I even heard Lisa muttering about all this damn anthropomorphism, as if the real signs of society occurring were all just wishful thinking.

But I do have sympathy for Lisa. Her team’s research got a pretty huge hit when Alpha was slowed down this week so that biology and anthropology could at the very least try to keep up with their data.

This basically all leads to the root of the problem, we are woefully understaffed. We are missing untold amounts of data every day. Our project was to create a world and we were perfectly sized to do that but our success has left us unprepared really on how to fully learn about what we’ve created. The parameter for success was to create a world and if we were so lucky as to have created a living world, to study it. We were a bit vague on study, and never would we have imagined how much there was to study. Greystle isn’t really going to go for hiring many more though we will need more for tangent alpha. Perhaps I can get Erick on board. This project can provide some shelter to people we know.