Greystle

Hey Rob, Adit here.

/ staticsky

A blog? I haven’t seen one of these since the Grid came up. Did you know one of my doctors had a Rasa blog going on when I was a kid? When I was tracking your web usage on Alice’s backup I looked it up and read it; it was like meeting an old elementary school friend. Well you know, I assume it would be like that, if I had any elementary school friends. Or if I went to elementary school.

So about your blog Rob, I was able to hack into it via the Grid. It looks like no one else has yet but just in case when you wake up I’m going to give you an old tablet pc that has all wireless connectivity removed from it. I figure that way no one can stumble on to it. That way you can keep updating this knowing Greystle can’t read it.

How ya doin’ Rob? Actually right now you’re snoring, I am five feet away from you. Since you were sleeping I figured this was as good a time as any to set up a bogus Grid account so you can get full write access again. I’ve already done all the other team managers. Tomorrow I’ll do the full alpha crew.

You and Janice huh? Well since I know your secrets I’m going to tell you a secret. Kaitlin and I have been an item since my upgrade.

And Rob. I think it is only a secret to you. You have been seriously missing things guy.

Anyway, about Kaitlin and I, when you wake up I do have something very cool to tell you.

Take care Rob, we’ve all been really worried.

Hey Rob – It’s still me, Adit

/ staticsky

Okay, I was messing with some of your old equipment you have back here, seeing if there was anything Kaitlin can use, and I find another Orexinal stash.

Not cool. First thing when you get up we’re going to go through everything you’ve got – together. I won’t tell Janice – If you help me flush all your stuff.

Look, it’s really important you do right by yourself and your whole team when you wake up.

With what has happened with Greystle we aren’t just a project team anymore we’re comrades in arms, and we need you fearless leader. Ned isn’t one of us, you are.

So stop this crap! If you don’t this is all going to fall apart.

Catching up 2 – POV

/ staticsky

When I got back to the office I thought the first thing I’d hear about was the status of Alpha, but instead it was about the subject I dread: Politics

There is some kind of court case against President Prescott going on and that seems to be the new excuse for an increase in crime in town and even in the green zone. The thing Adit and Kaitlin wanted me to know was that there was a curfew now in the green zone. They figured I wasn’t aware of that and I wasn’t.

The campus security is also especially twitchy now.

More importantly though Adit and Kaitlin let me in on their little secret: Using the tech that keeps Adit… umm… Adit (and not Rasa), they are able to share experiences.

They started working on this right after Adit got his upgrade.

If you want any proof that Orexinal was affecting my performance I think you need go no further than the fact that my two main technical resources had basically been working part time on the alpha project and full time on their own experiment, and I had no idea.

Much like how Kaitlin and Adit upgraded Adit so that all electrical activity is recorded and “played back” to trigger his memory, they now can record the specific frequencies of each brain reaction to stimuli and compare that to how another brain reacts to the same stimuli. They can then create a mapping table between the two.

The program would learn how I see blue, and it would learn how Adit sees blue. Then I could look at blue, and record my brain looking at blue and then upload that recording to Adit. He’d then see the blue. It isn’t a recording of the blue or even my brain’s reaction to the blue. It is my brain’s reaction to the blue mapped to Adit’s brain’s reaction to blue. It would be what I saw as if he saw it.

Adit and Kaitlin mapped different sensory experiences. Their reactions to colors, shapes, smells, sounds, lights, all were mapped. Then touch. And as they are intimate now… all touch. They can really “share the experience.”

So besides transsexuals it looks like if Hera and Zeus ever get into an argument about sex again they can ask Adit or Kaitlin rather than just relying on the answer Tiresias gave. And no, I did not ask either Kaitlin or Adit which sex enjoys sex the most. And given the difference in anatomy and thus the difference in neuron wiring to respond to feedback from said anatomy the shared experience can really only ever be an approximation.

Actually all sensations through this tech will just be approximations, but according to Adit even just watching TV from the point of view of the person sitting next to you blows away any sense of “self.” And coming from a man whose every memory is triggered by a computer program that is saying something.

Over some beers we discussed what to call this and though I personally thought Perceptitron was cool and retro, in the end we decided to call the tech POV (Point of View) and we decided not to tell Greystle… or anyone else.

Tatoos and Memories: Relationships

/ staticsky

Alice has upgraded her NetTat so that she can update the imagery via a contact lens interface.

She’s using it like a mood ring.

Sometimes there is a happy kitty on her arm, next razor wire around her neck, then a simple tear drop on her face. And yes I actually saw that progression today, all within an hour. She must be exhausting in a relationship.

And relationships are something I’m starting to get back. I feel like I’m friends again with everyone here. It isn’t like it used to be but it is getting better. I have hope again, hope that we will again be a family.

Luckily the us vs. them mentality here has really made getting back into the fold fairly smooth. The Greystle folks keep to themselves, and we keep to ourselves.

Ned is almost officially a Greystle employee at this point. He is now known as “Ned in Bed,” because he is basically a Greystle lackey and will always take their side in any argument.

One relationship that hasn’t been restored is the only real relationship I had. Janice is keeping me at a distance. I’ve lost her trust. She’s coming to me about Alpha related issues now, so that is an improvement, but she doesn’t treat me like a friend… yet. I hope I can type yet.

One blessing is that I think the whole situation was kept from Sally who is the only person who treats me exactly the way they always had. She is a great kid. How a girl can be so normal with only geeky adults for friends is a mystery. But even she knows her mom and I are no longer together, but she never asks. Its like she just wants to be a kid and doesn’t want to know.

Now Kaitlin and Adit. That is a relationship that seems to be going well, and seems to be pretty public knowledge by now, especially since I’m asked about it by someone at the Coke machine every time I’m there. Which, now that I’m back to traditional caffeine for my sleep denying needs, is someplace I am often at.

Kaitlin actually opened up to me a little about the relationship. She told me how proud she was of Adit to even be in a relationship.

“He’s not like you and me Rob. Every time he sees me every memory he has of me is retriggered. There is no distance and no priority based on time. He remembers everything and forgets nothing. He remembers how he felt when he met me, how he felt when he touched me, he remembers how I looked on every day he saw me. My bad hair days, my inside out shirts, and every runny nose I had.”

I didn’t really get the significance until she hit me over the head with it.

“Rob, if I yell at him he will remember it forever. He will be both hurt and angry forever. Not only will it never be forgotten, it won’t weaken. It’ll be like it just happened. And every moment of anger towards me will always be there making him both angry and ashamed forever. You see Rob, by getting together with me he’s really put his heart on the line.

It’s weird. I feel a pride in having someone risk so much for me, but god Rob there is also this wall I have to have, a circuit breaker that is always there because there is this responsibility you know. I could hurt him forever.”

I would risk anything for Janice, and I feel like it’d risk everything. But Adit, he has no choice, he really is putting everything out there.

Though I have to say I feel like I’m just as ashamed whenever I see Janice now as I was six weeks ago as I stood there watching her look at the floor instead of at me as all my failings were aired. And for now I want that shame to feel fresh. I deserve to feel it.

Begging for Bucks

/ staticsky

Well our presentation for a second round of funding from Greystle finally happened. Only 5 or so months late (oh but they’ve been good months).

We need more horse power and we need it fast. We want the servers to keep Alpha going, but also to take our simulations program to a whole new level.

We were not going to grow just another planet, we were going to grow an entire solar system. Start with just the “star stuff” and see it form a star with an accretion disc. Watch the planets form and jockey for position, watch life occur not just once but perhaps multiple times in multiple places in our new solar system. We’d learn incredible amounts about our own sol system and even about the Milky Way. And we’d stare at the beauty of our comets whizzing by our planets.

Greystle wanted to give us the funding; they were positively excited on that count. They just didn’t want to take the project in the logical direction that we had planed (and documented and charted and diagramed), they wanted to go a different way. A way that kind of freaks me out, though an interesting freak out.

They want to make history diverge. They want to take a snapshot of Alpha, put it on a new server set and run it from the time of the snapshot but with just a modest variation. They then want to see how the two Alphas become different from each other.

They want to see how they diverge, how quickly and how much. They didn’t seem interested in us discussing the lack of real science at play here and how this takes the project from observation to manipulation.

Our project is now taking an almost philosophical path now, where we actively play God. This new direction for the team didn’t go well in the staff meeting, but there was the unspoken understanding that if we didn’t take the money then Alpha itself would be turned off. Then someone said we were taking blood money, but that was met with groans. I can safely say that no one is happy about this.

Though I know I’m not alone in also thinking this will be kind of cool.

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.

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.

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.