Adit

Oh

/ staticsky

It wasn’t until I was 17 that I finally had a girlfriend. And it was serious, it way going to be forever. But even a 17 year old deep down knows that isn’t true, and when coming home from a movie in my parent’s ancient hybrid I blurted out that I was going to leave town and go to Dulles Tech. I didn’t let Anna speak I kept going on about how this was best for me, and how we can still have a relationship even though I’m gone, and though I didn’t plan it I started babbling about my parents getting a divorce and before I knew it I was crying. Finally I was silent and Anna said “Oh.”

Adit’s story is mentioned in dozens of studies. His case is the case study on countless white papers and thesis papers and journal articles – etc. Luckily as soon as he came to Dulles as a child he was known only as Rasa. I always assumed that was in reference to Tabula rasa, that and it sounds Indian. Rasa is famous in many diciplines of study – taking brain-computer interface (BCI or wetware) technology to a whole new level. Rasa was a source of pride at Dulles. Only Jack, Ned and I knew that Adit and Rasa were one in the same, until I told Kaitlin.

As soon as I heard Kaitlin say “hello” I leaped into listing resources we might need, how I’ll get Ned’s permission to secure a lab, and that budget was not an issue. Finally I paused, “what’s this about?” Kaitlin finally was able to ask. I let her know that Adit was Rasa and he was broken. Whatever Adit and Jack had done wasn’t working. I paused again. Silence, and then Kaitlin said “Oh.”

Now Kaitlin and Adit are making my stockpile of Orexinal disappear as we’ve locked ourselves into a lab right above the Greystle guys. If they only knew the patent potentials happening in this room.

Kaitlin is like a kid in a candy store looking at Jack’s specs on Rasa that Ned had locked away and working with Adit on possible reasons for the malfunction and ways to improve the system. I have to say Adit has taken to Kaitlin. He never had before – when he had memories of her from before his last night of sleep. He is starting to look like he is secure. I think he finally feels safe. Good. I can’t imagine what it really is like when everyone is a stranger.

I’m trying to help out, but I am so out of my league. Honestly the only help I can give them is time and privacy. Oh, and I seem to be getting the drinks and food too.

I am the go to intern on this project. I’m fine with that.

Knowing no one’s name

/ staticsky

Adit is sleeping on my office cot. Freaking out must be exhausting.

I’m not sure what the diagnosis is – or if there is a term for what Adit has – or is; but he was lumped into the “autistic” bucket even when he was a baby. Because they didn’t know else to call him.

Adit is unable to make any connections, to parents, siblings, the family dog. I’m bad with names, but Adit doesn’t recognize names, faces, voices – nothing. His family signed him over to a hospital and just walked away from his life. Without the human connections his learning was stunted and slow. As a toddler he was no smarter than an infant. A Dulles human behaviorism psychologist noticed him in a tour of the hospital. Here was this toddler who seemed to be learning who everyone was every morning but still seemed to understand symbols and mathematical concepts way beyond his years.

Adit is like an isolated mesh network. Once you are on the network everything is connected and working seamlessly. But the network stands alone; it has no connections to the wider grid. Adit is an island.

By the time Adit was five he was living at Dulles full time. His childhood was split between working with the math and later computer science departments on new ways to solve problems and taking social interaction classes where the psychology students tried to help Adit function in society. In the end labeled photos that he kept in his pocket was the big break through for him back then. It was a natural jump from that to keeping Adit wired to a face recognition program and having his lens project biographical information for him for everyone he saw. It always would freak out strangers that Adit knew their names.

As a teen Adit met Jack and worked with him on skipping the lens projection and fire the information right into his brain. When Jack and Adit first zapped his brain with a face and a name they watched the scan live as his while brain lit up. A cascading effect had been triggered and hundreds/thousands of memories about that person surfaced.

They discovered that Adit was not only storing memories of people and the events that occurred with the people, he was (with zapping) able to recall all of the memories in minute detail.

Adit held on to and utilized those resurfaced memories all day, but when he woke the next day they were all gone. Just as it had been all his life. The resurfacing wasn’t permanent.

Jack and Adit worked on multiple methods to consistently recreate the memory cascade. Despite the occasional seizures induced by a zap too many they made quick progress. Adit refined the program and the hardware specs. In the end Jack had wired up Adit’s brain like a Christmas tree.

In real time the system records all of the electrical traffic in the brain created by all the new experiences being generated and stores the last 5 seconds or so of every interpersonal interaction. Simultaneously it triggers a replay of the last recorded interaction with a person when he meets that person again each day.

Today it didn’t work.

Adit woke up completely lost. After a huge freak-out in the main square as stranger after stranger who knew who he was approached him asking if they could help, Adit escaped back into his apartment. Luckily he found a “break in case of emergency” note that had a photo of me with contact information.

It took hours to calm him down enough to eat some food and come back to the lab.

I’m trying to reach Jack and am getting nowhere. Now I’m starting to freak-out.

Om

/ staticsky

Today was the day. A simple command line was entered by Adit, and I got to hit the red enter button.

“Om” Adit chanted as we looked at the code fill up the screen. I let out a laugh but Janice gave the “that” look. Adit was being serious. “Om” being the first sound of the universe or something.

When we projected the rendered images the gravity of the moment hit me. The gases, dust, and debris gathering together before us. Alpha was being born. EDIT: I just noticed the gravity pun – sorry.

We’ve started

We have it cranked up so Alpha should begin cooling by the end of the week.

Ned and I have a meeting at the Greystle Group tomorrow to get more funds. Kaitlin has quite a wish list for new hardware.

Because I need to get ready, I’m skipping the “launch” party, which is probably just as well. A bunch of basement dwellers getting together in a stunned state of disbelief (at having actually begun and still recovering from the whole Jack/DHS fiasco) is probably as fun as it sounds.

Quantum Compression

/ staticsky

The main issue earlier large-scale simulations encountered is the sheer horsepower needed to just get it all right. From the atom to the look of the night sky.

It was Jack who came up with the quantum compression concepts – initially as a joke to answer the age old “are we a simulation ourselves” question. His answer was that just as with the concept of God we can’t disprove it, and as with God unless some deep voice booms out from the clouds in the skies and says “‘ello just us testin’ out some ideas – carry on” we will never know. Jack believes that as long and as hard as we look God or the simulation will just give us more questions. Or reality. Whatever. When you see it then it exists, until then God, the simulation, or reality doesn’t even bother working out the details.

And that was Jack’s idea. An observed phenomenon is a changed phenomenon. That is how it works in reality, and that is what Adit took and coded into our simulation.

All reality (if there is one) and all of the simulation that is not “sentient” (sentience really just being self modifying algorithms) is just an algorithm, a rule “unexploded” when unobserved, and when observed it is a seemingly endless series of Russian dolls that will go on forever for as long as the observation continues. “Look we found atoms, the smallest of the small… no wait, now we’ve found electrons, protons, and neutrons truly the smallest of the small… no wait….” etc. etc.

Now there is no need to run out of server power working out the whole simulation – only what is observed is rendered. The observer could be a sentient entity within the simulation, or the observer could be us watching our simulation unfold. All the potential is stored up in the algorithm. All the cause and effect, from time to wind to water salination is accounted for, and if we want to check on that portion of the simulation the code explodes and unwinds. The servers crunch the data and we see the results as if they were being rendered the entire time. And when I say “render” I just mean feedback on what we are probing. Not pretty pictures. Though we can do that – its cool when we do.

Party

/ staticsky

Dr. Stevens – Ned – introduced the team to the Greystle Group today. These guys are the ones who gave us the grant to make this possible; they put the money behind this, instead of just all the talk. A dinner party… yes, I was as excited as you are.

I’ve seen articles, books, and films about simulated worlds from decades back (Ned has quite a collection), but it’s been possible to do this for at least 5 years. The cost was the wall. And I guess that wall finally got cheap enough for Greystle to bite the bullet for us.

Of course they get a healthy chunk of the patents that we are already grinding out just in setting this up. How they make money off of this esoteric code is their issue.

At least there was free food at the party. A bunch of basement dwellers meeting incredibly boring powerful wealthy folks was not as an amusing sitcom set up as you would think.

Yes, I know we just sit all day staring at our screens, hands deep in sensors, but god these guys were dull. Vacuous really. How the hell do you get to be so connected and so rich and just have a frat house level of interest in reality is beyond me.

Janice brought her daughter Sally to the party. Poor girl. She’s big now – I think she’s six. I remember when Sally was born in our sophomore year. It felt like we all had suddenly taken a step into adulthood (though not quite a big a step as for Janice). Sally got quite a big family – basically the whole Alpha team.

Did I mention that it is weird that we are called the Alpha team when there is no other “team” in the Dulles Tech Simulations Department?

Janice is our biologist. She’s overseeing all the life Alpha contains. Or will. Maybe. She is busy though, summing up “life” into a series of rules and requirements. And sum is the correct word. The idea is to let Alpha develop. Gravity is a simple rule when you get down to it, and so are other core things that make up “reality,” and in the end so is Life. What becomes life (How it becomes) based on our basic rules is what the Alpha project is about. She really is the big wig of the project for that reason.

Janice is also the team mom because she really is a mom and we’re all just Sally’s bigger brothers and sisters.

The only person who seemed to have fun at the party was Jack. Jack is our lead technologist – the hardware man if you want – but it is software that makes this possible. He makes sure we are “up and running.” It’s his wild scattered imagination that is his real gift to the team. Quantum Compression, the theory that makes a large-scale simulation like ours possible, almost reasonable, was his concept. Adit is our algorithm God; he made Quantum Compression work, but just the idea (as amazingly obvious as it is now) came from Jack.

Many of Jack’s ideas are worthless though. And he seems to have a new one almost every day. At the party he kept pushing one of the Greystle ladies to invest in his idea of a children’s book series. The books would have names like “Nietzsche for nippers, Kant for kids, Buddhism for babies, and Jung for youngsters. It was hilarious hearing him explain to her how it would read: “Zarathustra says God is Dead. Dead Dead Dead..” She didn’t seem interested.

In the end the party really was a bust. But Ned just seemed relieved that none of us screwed anything up. No wine stains on our investors thank you.