Om

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.

I Can’t Sleep

Well actually I haven’t tried, but I’m pretty sure I can’t sleep. It’s been two days now. Basically it’s a combo of starting Alpha, working to get all our requirements done for the proposal Greystle wants, and asking out Janice (well without the actual asking out part – I’ll get to it).

I got some Orexinal at the campus store and it works great, I was starting to fall apart and now I’m doing fine.

I won’t mention this to Janice. I mean she’ll be pissed enough about me taking a drug, but the fact that the pharma company that makes Orexinal is one of Greystle’s companies will push her over the edge. Ever since the Jack crap she’s gotten to be an almost activist about those guys. Ned and I now make sure she never goes to any meetings with them.

Life in a poison world

Life – or something like it!

That was fast. The universe really must be teeming with life.

When we first started out Jack and a lot of the anthropology folks wanted to go the exogenesis route and just plop life willy nilly all over Alpha. I think their argument was basically “it would save time.” We went the organic compound route. Some Greystle guy thought that meant we were going the panspermic route and Janice practically bit off their face when she heard that.

This was about seeing life happen, not watching it evolve from microganisms or another primitve form of life. It was about seeing life itself occur. So yeah we had rocks dropping on alpha with stuff, but none of that stuff was alive.

The rocks, comets, and dust were as chockfull of organic compounds as those we’ve found way out in the Kuiper belt: amino acids and primative sugars, just like my mom’s cooking.

I’d say it is beautiful watching the shooting stars splash into the dead world, the splash of molten metals, the swirls of gas shooting away from the impacts at hurricane speed, and the instant electrical storms, but the truth is we have all been so busy pouring over all the unspooling data that we’ve never bothered rendering anything that’s been going on for the past week.

Our patent pending count from the gasses, isatopes, and other general crap is already over fifty and Greystle has brought in their own chemistry folks. The fourth floor now has more of their people than ours. Janice won’t go on the fourth floor anymore, she says they’re spies. Not sure how you can spy on your own product, but I understand; you can’t help but feel self-concious around those guys.

The fourth floor has the only vending machine with Janice’s favorite noodle bowl, so I have to go up there twice a day. Those guys do not fit in. We’re all running around excitedly spouting out words like “stromatolites” and “prokaryotes” they’re talking about “office action” and “patent flooding.”

On Land

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.

Our First Die Off

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.

Flight

Though the die off is still happening it doesn’t mean evolution has stopped on Alpha. We passed a milestone of sorts today: an Alphan flew.

I guess you could call these fliers “bugs” but they’re weird drippy things (seriously, they drip, like they’re rotting) that hop/fly between puddles as they evaporate. They can actually cover a substantial distance before they have to land.

Janice’s team has declared the species be called the Volucris Dumonticis after Santos Dumont the Brazilian aviator. I guess we have a lot of Brazilian biologists on our project, and they were quite proud of the name. Cool.

Ned made a cameo appearance down to the main Alpha lab this morning carrying a big box and a big grin. Jack had sent Ned a gift for helping Jack out with travel permits.

It was a 45 year old Macintosh computer. No hard drive, no color, no ports of any use, and yet this little 8 mhz machine was an integral part of a path the led from the abacas to Alpha.

Kaitlin was in awe and giggled when Ned turned it on and she heard the tinny little chime. Some of the students (okay and staff) didn’t even know what it was at first, they thought it would look a little less old.

And with that Ned went back upstairs with his little bundle of joy. He didn’t even ask how Alpha was going.

Too bad, because it’s going well we’ve got vertebrates now in all flavors, cold, warm, and this one species that switches based on the ease of finding food. Very cool.

Oceans of Fish and Fields of Beasts

Alpha is going better than we had allowed ourselves to hope. Okay, that is a lame thing to say, obviously he hoped it would go this well, we all did. But such a success was kept off our project goals. Best to keep disappointment secret.

Alpha is no disappointment. Alpha is wonderful.

Janice’s team wants to slow down the simulation so we can study the biodiversity, animals in shapes and sizes we have never seen in our planet’s history. But the study of mating behaviors of animals that don’t exist isn’t what we’re about. We’re studying the life of a planet as well as the lives that live there. We’ve got billions of years to go.

Now the real world, my world, isn’t so wonderful. Janice has had to cancel dates “due to scheduling conflicts” every day this week. Something is wrong. Maybe she thinks I’ve been spending time with Alice… God I hope not. I don’t want her to ever think I am in any way more interested in someone else. My world is her and that fake world rendered downstairs. I’m too nervous to talk to her about it directly. Its like I’m back to where I was months ago… afraid to have a real relationship.

Our Study of Life – Saving Lives

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.

Hitting the Fan

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.