Adit

Hitting the fan II – this time it’s personal

/ staticsky

I look like crap, I feel like crap.

And tonight I go to sleep. I really have no choice. I’m locked into my room, and I’m not allowed out until after I wake up. And sleep I will, they took away my Orexinal.

They have Kaitlin in the other room acting as my guard. I wonder if they’ll slide me food under the door.

How could it have come to this? Pathetic sad little boy afraid to go to asleep. I am crap.

Earlier today I went to get some Mountain Dew and Twizzlers. I came back from the snack machine to find Alice, Adit, Kaitlin, and Janice in my office. Janice’s eyes were red and she wouldn’t look at me.

Alice noted that the whole group knew not only of my Orexinal habit but what I myself had read about it on the old web. It seems I’m not as good as I thought with the old browsers and I had left a cache of all the sites I visited on Alice’s cube.

Adit and Kaitlin apologized for not recognizing I had a problem because they had thought I had stop using when we had finished the “Rasa” project.
I tried to explain that it hadn’t affected me, and that was met with a strong rebuke. Examples of my failures were too easily given from handling Greystle and the VKV to my inability in getting additional funding.

Janice’s rebuttal hit home the most. “Really Rob? No effect?”

In an effort to relieve my pain Adit decided to increase my embarrassment with a question I couldn’t really answer. When was the last time I took a shower? I’m sure it was just a few days ago.

I tried to explain it was hard to get into a routine without really having a “morning routine” anymore.

When I started to get angry and a little aggressive Adit grabbed my arm, which made me scream out in pain. I hadn’t realized I had begun cutting myself. Late at night I guess. Perhaps I was trying to keep my body awake.

I tried to explain it to them even though I didn’t understand it myself. Janice left the room without talking to me.
I guess that is what an intervention is.

They let me across campus to my room. You’d think a person basically being dragged would grab attention, but the lawns now seem to be just a staging area for near riots between Prescott supporters and activists. No one noticed us.

God I am tired. I’m frightened, what if I don’t wake up? Will this be how Janice remembers me? How will she explain this to Sally?
My head hurts.

Hitting the Fan

/ staticsky

At six this morning Ned ran into my office absolutely livid. He was a mess. It looked like he came into the lab right out of bed. And basically he had. He got an early morning visit from a Greystle lawyer.

Ned ranted about how the project was not only going to stop but that I and the whole team was going to go to jail.

What the hell?!?

“Rule Number 1 Rob, Rule Number 1 – Don’t screw the money!” Ned said that every ten minutes for most of the morning.

Someone in the biology team was so excited about the medical possibilities of the VKV that they sent some of the info to some medical students. They went outside the team.

Greystle found out about it instantly. What idiot on our team would put project data on the grid? It doesn’t matter if it was encrypted, that is a fantasy now anyway with every key owned by the government. And now I guess we could say Greystle owns them too.

When Ned ran to meet with Greystle’s lawyers I called all the managers to the main floor. Adit, Janice, Kaitlin, etc. Every group manager was there and I let them have it. I asked them if their CVs were up to date because they were going to need them soon. I was shaking. I think I might have been crying.

I told them that Alpha would most likely die and that Ned was trying to save our asses.

And then it got worse.

Janice just stared at me coldly and said “you would kill them all. All the animals, all that life. You’d kill them all for Greystle?”

I always thought the phrase “the silence was deafening” was crap, but I swear my eardrums were bleeding while all of us just stood there. No one shuffled. No one cleared their throat. A lot of death to think about, and inside I screamed as I thought of what Janice must now think of me.

When I finally spoke again I took a more conciliatory tone. I said that if Alpha was going to continue we’ve got to work better with Greystle. If the VKV is going to be used in medicines and save lives in the REAL world we’d need to work with Greystle or else what we learned here could never be used to help anyone.

I then ordered Pizza. That seemed to help a bit. But there was almost no small talk as we ate. Janice wouldn’t look at me.

During lunch Ned came in with somewhat good news. Alpha would live.

Ned convinced Greystle that the mistake would not be repeated and that Alpha was a proven money maker that could not exist nor be maintained without the present project team.

So now as it stands nothing has changed except that if any of us leaves the green zone we are instantly off the project and possibly even instantly put it jail.

We also lost our write access to the grid.

Okay, this is embarrassing to admit, but I didn’t know it was possible to that. I’m sure Adit will figure out a work around, otherwise half the team will lose their entire social life.

So we’re now prisoners of the campus and the green zone. Just as well I guess, none of us ever left… really. I mean at least now our campus pharmacy is fully stocked of Orexinal. Of course even if I didn’t take some tonight I doubt I’d be able to sleep.

I’m pretty sure we’ll have to push back our “beg for more money” presentation to Greystle yet again.

Our Study of Life – Saving Lives

/ staticsky

Down on Alpha an amphibian species (mega toads really) started getting wiped out by an auto-immune virus. Not a big deal in itself because we’ve had thousands of species develop millions of diseases by now.

What was interesting was that the mega toads (officially we’ve been naming everything with 16 alpha-numeric codes that note their evolutionary tree and closest real world sister species, but that is not really good for conversation – mega toad is what we call these guys) evolved a defense mechanism that basically out-evolved the disease.

The toad’s immune system adapted to host a virus. A case of endosymbiosis, this virus would not attack the toad nor would the toad’s immune system attack it. The virus “lived” by using the auto-immune virus as the building block to replicate itself. A virus of a virus. Now my understanding is that the definition of a virus is that it is dormant until it is inside a cell, so this mega toad hosted virus killing virus isn’t really a virus. It is something new.

Though Janice’s people pour over all the data coming out about Alpha’s life forms and their evolutionary turns, but there is just so much detail, luckily Adit’s got multiple agents in the code to scan for the evolution of bacterias and viruses and flag any evolutionary path that isn’t following the standard lifespan bell curve. That’s how this was caught.

The biology team had no problem convincing me that the simulation should be slowed down to near real time so that this could be studied in more detail. It really seems that this virus killing virus (and yes we do now call it VKV) could be engineered in the real world. We could cure scores of diseases.

Orexinal

/ staticsky

I’m afraid to go back to sleep now. I feel like a child afraid of nightmares. But I’m afraid of dreams. I’m afraid of even a moment of not being conscious. A moment of not being in control. I think there is even a tinge of the classic “what if I don’t wake up” fear, but it’s more of “how long will I sleep” fear. Will it be days?

And gosh durn it, I get so much done never going to sleep.

I know at some point I need to stop taking Orexinal. Alpha is up and running, Adit is up and being Adit, and I even have a personal life! I don’t need to always stay awake.

There is nothing more I want than to wake up next to Janice, but there is nothing more frightening to me right now than the idea of being asleep.

Fear wins.

With Kaitlin and Adit using some of my Orexinal supply I’m beginning to run low. And I’m starting to get really anxious about it.

I’ve checked with the campus pharmacy and they’re all out, and not expecting more for at least a few weeks. The strikes have disrupted a lot of the supply chain.

The Good News is Alice has a contact in town that can get me a couple of months supply, the bad news is that he is pricey and outside the green zone.

Oh well. Field trip!

Our First Die Off

/ staticsky

In our planet’s history there have been multiple periods of mass extinctions, Die Offs, where changes in environment or atmosphere or something cause a significant percentage of life on the planet to disappear.

I guess I wouldn’t want Alpha to be different as it is supposed to teach us what life (and the history of life) could look like on a different planet.

But it is still hard to see the Alphans (so many types of slugs!) disappear. To Janice it is like watching pets die, for Adit it is like knowing the code you worked so hard on was removed in beta; I’m not sure what it is for me except that it leaves me cold. I don’t want these things, bits of data, to die.

But they are.

First it was what should be one of the hardiest form of life, bacteria. Strains of this and strains of that started dying off and we didn’t notice until we started comparing the life count summaries we get at the end of each day.

Then we slowed down the simulation a tad so we could see in more detail what was happening. You’d think the die off would move up the food chain if it started with the bacteria, but then larger species far removed in the food chain started dying off, and then a variety of grasses. The cause and effect is impossible to track.

But track it is why were doing all of this.

Adit and Alice are leading most of the development team in going over the code in greater detail to make sure this isn’t a software bug (how awful it would be to find out that this pivotal moment in the history of Alpha is an error in some routine). So far nothing seems wrong, just as with the invertebrate issue, this seems to be part of Alpha’s evolution.

Kaitlin and Janice have been going through the snap shot archives of Alpha to see if there were any earlier signs of chemical changes in the atmosphere that we might have missed. The snapshots are hard archives of a moment in time in Alpha. Alpha is just too huge and memory intensive to record so every ten minutes of real runtime a moment in time is frozen and stored. Given that our simulation speeds have varied from real time to as fast as the servers can go, the snapshots capture intervals as short as ten minutes up to hundreds of thousands of years in Alpha time.

The tricky thing is that the snapshots are literally of what was, and as much of what Alpha is, is various algorithms unfolding, interacting, and rewriting themselves with a touch of randomness. So though it is Alpha’s past if Alpha started again from there (then?) the present Alpha we see might not be the Alpha that unspools. i.e. that past could lead to infinite versions of the present. Statistically they’d average out to be the same, but tell that to the dead slugs.

So far it looks like this was the natural evolution of the planet but we’ll continue looking into it. Like I said, Earth has gone through many such die offs in its history, so this maybe just be the first for Alpha, but it is awful to watch the list of extinct Alphans fly by on the screen.

One nice thing is that Alice has updated her NetTat to a still Mickey Mouse. I guess she realized the animated evolution tattoo she had on her arm earlier the week wasn’t in good taste once the die off started to happen.

Dinner with Janice

/ staticsky

At last! Maybe it was the giddy excitement of knowing Rasa was gone (done?) and that I could get back to the Alpha project, or just fear of her staying angry with me, but I suddenly had the courage to ask her out. And I even said, “umm… you know, as a date.” And she didn’t hesitate to say yes.

Whooo Hooo!

Alas it was a platonic date to be sure, but after all these years of friendship I think a kiss (or anything else) on the first “date” would have been a bit too much.

It was a great dinner. Luckily there are a lot of great restaurants to choose from in the green zone around campus so we didn’t go into town (which I haven’t done in years). We chatted about Sally, Alpha, and even Greystle.

Something amazing is happening in Alpha, evolution is progressing quickly there are insects, plants, and an abundance of animals in the seas and lands of Alpha. But there aren’t any vertebrates yet. If this was the history of Earth we’d already have a variety of vertebrates walking and swimming about. But nothing yet on Alpha. The whole biology department is giddy over the puzzle this presents, but just in case Janice is having Adit look over some of the biology related algorithms and routines. It’d be awful if we discovered our bug filled Alpha was due to a bug and not just the way life happened to have evolved on Alpha.

Personally I hope we do get some vertebrates on our little world soon. Perhaps it’s my “fanboy” side but I’d love to see sentience and eventually intelligence and culture. Basically I’d love to see cool alien cities on Alpha. And I just don’t see invertebrates delivering that – does that make me a speciest? Or a backbone bigot?

I had thought Janice’s hate for Greystle was based in politics. And while there is that, there is a more personal side. She blames them for the destruction of her uncle’s dream. Janice’s uncle was the inventor of the “Real Cost” Gas Monitor.

I remember the late night ads from when I was a kid (have I always had a problem with sleeping?). The gas monitor clipped into you car and tracked that amount of fuel going out of your fuel pump and showed you the cost of what you were consuming in real time. When you got gas the system reset to the new price. So while idling at a stoplight or when leaving the car on while talking to friends on the road the drivers could see the nickels flip by. Pass someone on a hill and you could see the quarters flip by. With people seeing immediately the cost of their driving they would actually change their driving habits. When people realized it cost $7.50 just to go to the store they started being more diligent with making shopping lists.

Janice’s uncle wanted his invention to give a tangible incentive to customers to cut back on driving and poor driving habits. He wanted less fossil fuel to be burned, but he knew the easiest way to get people to do the right thing is to show them the immediate benefit to themselves. And saving money always works.

His product was changing driving habits. A consumer study proved that his product was having a dramatic effect on the amount of gas people purchased within 6 weeks of buying the “Real Cost” Gas Monitor. He was doing a good business but he always knew that if he had more money he could make more of them, make them better, make them cheaper and market them to a wider audience. Then some San Hill Road venture capital guy showed up at his office with an incredible opportunity. Her uncle sold his company for partial ownership in larger multinational venture. His product would be taken to the world.

Well needless to say it wasn’t. The company was shut down and her uncle lost the rights to sell his own product. The patent holders were this new company and this new company wouldn’t sell his product. He was devastated. As was his family, and as a young girl Janice saw her proud, big, and fun Uncle became the quiet, withdrawn, and sad man that she knew until he died a few years later.

When Janice got older she did do some research on the venture firm and found out it was owned by a division of Greystle. All the other investments of that division were in oil and gas processing and distribution. They had purchased her uncle’s company with the sole goal of destroying his product. I guess leaving him financially ruined as well was just their idea of fun.

That put a damper on the conversation for a while, but talk of Sally and her growing interest in science got as back on a more joyful track.
Date Number One: Success!

Kaitlin the Synesthetic

/ staticsky

Besides learning more about neurology then I ever thought I would, I also learned some fun things while in the lab: Kaitlin is synesthetic.

Specifically she has some sort of grapheme-color synesthesia. But she doesn’t just see numbers or letters in colors. Well not really. She says she sees “specs” in colors. As she scans the specifications of hardware, its emf frequency, fcc rating, input requirements, etc; it becomes colored.

Adit and I would quiz her on the fcc rating of equipment and she’d look up at the spec sheet and give the right answer instantly. It seems the darker the blue the higher the rating. Who knew? Well, okay Kaitlin – but no one else, because we can’t see the colors.

It was wild looking at Kaitlin stand back from the spec sheets and have us rearrange them as if she’s matching color swatches. But it works, so I don’t mess with it. She could tell what was compatible with what by seeing if the colors flowed well together or if they clashed. Hardware configuration as interior design.

Adit is hardware and software conflict free.

Grass

/ staticsky

Walking back to the lab with lunch I suddenly stopped and realized Spring was already at its peak. All the leaves were out, dark green and full sized. It seemed like the trees were all still grey when Rasa, Kaitlin and I first “moved” into the lab.

I put down the bags and took off my shoes. I swear I heard my toes sigh as they dug into the grass. I needed a break, just a short break, and sat down on the hill in front of our building.

I heard my name and turned to see Sally.

I must say Sally made me happier than I’ve been in weeks when she let me know that Janice missed me. Sally said she missed me too and then she made me feel like dirt: I had missed her birthday earlier this week.

She accepted my lame excuse about work and stuff, and I think I finally got back on her good side by rolling down the hill with her over and over again.

I think there is a biological milestone just after puberty that makes getting dizzy something that induces nausea instead of giddiness.

Nothing like walking into a lab with cold food, grass in your hair, and mud on your pants to stop the conversation. If I didn’t know it was impossible I’d say that Adit lost his train of thought.

Jack and the Analytical Engine

/ staticsky

I finally was able to get a hold of Jack; it was weird hearing from him after so much has happened.

Kaitlin has basically taken Jack’s earlier work and quickly made it her own. In fact she’s updated Adit’s system so that all of the wiring can be external of the skull. Now all Adit really would need is a cap but for aesthetic reasons they’ve been grafting the inputs below the scalp. Not only can the sensors on top of the skull record the firing of each neuron to record the memories – senses, and emotions, but the sensors can record the unique frequency of each neuron’s firing so the “playback” doesn’t actually have to be from “shocking” the effected area as before but actually by shocking the skull at the neuron’s frequency. The brain then thinks that neuron fired. This makes Adit’s new system exponentially more precise than the one Adit and Jack came up with years back. Rasa is now Adit 2.0 (God he’d kill me if he heard me say that). Its good to have Adit back. Rasa is almost completely gone now. Adit even slept last night and woke up knowing who we were, and what we were doing; basically knowing who he is.

All of the old hardware in the brain is no longer needed which is why we needed to get a hold of Jack. Occasionally the “playback” hits a frequency close to what the old hardware was tuned to – and when that happens we get instant seizures. Adit’s got a big ass bruise on his head from when the first one hit. With the new method for “playback” seizures are no longer supposed to be an issue.

When Rasa first came to me I was trying everything to get a hold of Jack, but truth is once I found out Kaitlin was on top of things and Ned had most of the specs, it didn’t become as necessary for me to find Jack – and I was kind of relived. Now we needed him. We can’t remove the old hardware without at least doing an itty bit of damage so what we need to do is map out all of the frequencies of the old hardware so that when Adit is experiencing a memory “play back” we skip anything that would conflict with the old hardware. Sure there might be itty bits of memory gaps here and there, but at most we’re talking about a blink. I forget more in ten minutes then Adit probably will over his lifetime.

Ned didn’t have that kind of detail on the hardware Jack used, so we hoped Jack did. And he did. Jack had the details in a secure area of one of his grid corners – we got the info instantly. But Jack really wanted from me was help with his new idea.

Jack wants to make and market desktop versions of Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. Yes you too can have an analog computer the size of a small room and made of iron and brass miniaturized to the size of a knick-knack for your desk. While I agree not many people have a fully functional metal analog computer of gears, rods, and levers as a paperweight, I’m not sure many would want one. Jack went on to explain that at first he was going to make Babbage’s Difference Engine because there were complete plans, but he thought everyone would just think of it as a cool Victorian calculator, but with the Analytical Engine each purchase would come with a stack of punch cards with programs ready to go. “Though no one would actually use it – it would be much more obvious to them and the friends they are showing it off to that it is indeed a computer.”

Jack needs to get out of state. He made a grid contact that can work on mass-producing the prototype Jack made after he finalized Babbage’s specs. But there are some design issues his “contact” has encountered and Jack needs to get into New Jersey to help with it. I really don’t want to get into this and I pushed him off to Ned – politely of course.

He’s not even allowed into Jersey now. Damn, I don’t think he realized how much of his freedom Maple Sap was going to cost him. Who would?

On Land

/ staticsky

Almost spilled some of the miso soup on some neurologists who were leaving the lab when I brought in lunch. They were brought into the lab to help Kaitlin and Rasa on some things. Yep, Kaitlin and I have started calling Adit “Rasa;” we want to make sure we don’t use his real name with any of the folks that come in to help now and then – when we get into something that’s out of our areas of expertise (well that’s almost on everything for me).

Got a call earlier for Janice that some Alphans made land! I wish I was there. I was going to use that event as an excuse to ask Janice out. A milestone of the project celebrated by just the two us – some place nice. Alone. Instead I’m basically living in a lab with Kaitlin and Rasa. Actually using the name Rasa has another advantage – this isn’t Adit. Not yet, not until he’s “fixed.” He is different. I miss Adit, and I’m sure Rasa does too.

Anyway the Alphans that made land don’t have lungs yet. Janice says they have an amazing filtration system in their “skin” that basically plucks the oxygen right out of the air. I think Kaitlin was half proud and impressed at her “Alphans” progress but also just as pissed that we again handed Greystle a patent bonanza. You just know that there will be ten new products coming out next year that filter air in heavily polluted areas and none of them will mention Dulles, Alpha, or the cute little slime blobs that made it happen.

I think Janice is pissed at Adit, Kaitlin, and I too. She doesn’t know what we are up to. Ned has told everyone that we have to prototype a new simulation process for Greystle so we can get a new round of funding from them. I know he choose that excuse because it was the most plausible, but it just pushes Janice’s buttons. She hates those guys.