Janice

Back on Campus

/ staticsky

I had lunch on campus today – not at the roach coach not in the basement of our lab – in the actual student center. Society has a type of reverse entropy in that no matter the level of chaos it strives for normalcy. Or at the very least routine.

So I’m back to staying in my room, Sally is back to going to school (now located on campus), and if the green zone was open I’d work up the courage to ask Janice out on a date. A date on campus doesn’t seem right. Dating… see? an attempt at normalcy.

Erik has moved back to his room as well. We all have. The Green Zone is quiet and I hear the riots in town now are just something that happen every evening. The fear is gone just a sad desperation or perhaps a resignation seems to fill the air.

About the math

/ staticsky

Frank Zell, our consultant from the math department was able to give us a bit of an executive summary as to what our lizards are doing down there on Alpha (side note, their intellectual pursuits seems to have slipped a bit on Tangent).

From what I could make out it sounds like they are doing some serious math. I felt like an idiot in there, I generally know enough of most of our pursuits to at least follow along, whether it is the biology, physics, or even the coding of Alpha, but this was far beyond me.

Janice was with me on that, she looked fascinated, but bewildered. Adit seemed to be soaking it in the most.

Anyway they seem to be doing theoretical math. Math in multiple dimensions. Not just our standard three, or even four, but six, ten, 20. Pure insanity math. Spaces and manifolds and stuff. Pretty esoteric.

Frank even said as much. Beyond pure intellectual pursuit the only real reason to do such high level math is to explain some of what we see on the macro and micro levels, areas where Newtonian physics fall down.

Quote of the day was Adit, “so we’ve got a simulated organism equipped with proofs for theories on quantum fields and a multiverse while they live purely in a digital world.”

I have to admit that was jarring. I forget that all the Alphans from the now extinct jelly fish elephant like things to the lizards are really just zeros and ones. And here they were working out math that could help us understand better our analog reality.

Trying to sound like a project manager I chipped in with a concern as to whether or not their science advancements could soon outstrip our processing power, no matter how many upgrades we get (which Kaitlin now has occurring everyday at 11:00, shortly after the morning’s component shipment – I don’t even need to ask for money these day, Greystle just signs the checks without asking questions).

The answer is not yet, simply because they only are theorists, our friends are doing math that Frank says would fascinate Ng himself, but they don’t have equipment yet. They haven’t gone electronic. They haven’t even gone to smelting metals yet, something the much more primitive primates up north have been doing off and on for generations now. Until they go beyond theoretical we are in good shape, but as soon as they actually begin to compute and study with something more than their amazing brains we’ve got an issue.

I think I’ve got a pretty good reason now for asking permission from Greystle to slow the simulations down a bit. These lizard Alphans may just be a few generations away from making this entire project beyond our technical capabilities.

We got a gold star today at school

/ staticsky

Greystle is ecstatic about how tangent has worked out.

They’ve even given us some rewards. Though they don’t call them that.

They are now saying it is safer out. And maybe it is but you can still hear gun fire from the town. But supposedly the green zone is calm. Though we’ve been told that no one from our department is allowed to leave campus. But the point is we are allowed back into the campus – that is, we are finally allowed outside. Ahhh Vitamin D here I come.

It’s almost frightening how everyone is pretending things are back to normal. I even saw a frisbee game on the grounds today. Which of course is all the more exciting in the cold because the Frisbees crack when they hit a tree.

The roach coach lady is back which is a nice change from the basement food. Even if the quality of the food is a little sketchy. She’s not much for small talk these days though. Janice says she lost someone in the fighting.

There are some troops stationed near the main gate, and I hear there are a lot more in the woods on west side. But besides that, if you pretend, you can make yourself believe nothing has changed, except for the bunker like guard stations and the few burned out buildings on east campus.

On the lighter side it was like a gift to see Sally be able to run around in the snow. And being on a campus has its advantages if you want to start a snowball fight, there were plenty of people ready to join her.

Back inside we got permission from our “managers” at Greystle for someone from the mathematics department to check out the work being done by our southern lizard friends on Alpha. Not Ng, of course, but one of his grad students.

I’d never seen such a large pile of NDAs and other forms they gave the guy to sign.

At the end of the day it was hard to keep on target in the debrief we had with him. As much as we were proud of our lizards and we wanted to learn more of their achievements we mostly quizzed him about life on campus for the past few weeks.

Basically the lockdown wasn’t limited to us. There were still classes, but generally you took them from your dorm room. Troops occupied most of the grounds. Lab classes happened if the building was available via the maintenance tunnels. In the end his experience didn’t seem any better than ours, in fact it sounded a lot worse. He didn’t even get much more sunlight than us as most of the windows were boarded up.

Meanwhile the grid is full of celebrity news. Divorces seem to be on the up rise, but the uprisings don’t get much coverage.

Living in the basement

/ staticsky

I used to joke how our team was just a bunch of basement dwellers, of course there were less of us then, but we didn’t live in a basement. But you know. Times change.

They’ve got a huge kitchen/dining area in our new basement campus and have even brought in some pretty good cooks. Though part of me misses the roach coach lady.

We have breakfast, lunch, and dinner there, and we eat in shifts. Not sure if that is really because there are so many folks living in here now or if Greystle want us to think there are.

The place just feels so large now. There are people on the staircase and in the halls that I don’t recognize. I have no idea where they came from or where they go during the day.

Janice, Kaitlin and Adit certainly have their ideas but I’ve pretty loudly told the teams the best thing for us is to just keep working on the project and let the world figure itself out.

Narcissistic? True, but giving basement dwelling nerds permission to live only in their world and not the real one is what I needed to do. Nothing good is going to happen if we get involved. And what could we do anyway. What should we do?

Besides, the project is the only thing that is really joyful in here. Well that and Sally. She’s taken to this so well, though she is definitely getting a little stir crazy. If it ever feels safe enough to pull POV out again I’d love to find some nice field or beach for her run on.

They’ve got some great horse like creatures in one of the southern continents. Sally would love to be one of those.

Sally’s also got the beat theories as to what is going on. Mostly they have to do with aliens.

Tear gas on the way home today

/ staticsky

I tried to sleep to the sounds of gun shots and the occasional explosion coming from the town and perhaps even from within the green zone itself. It was a failure. It seems fear keeps me awake better than Orexinal.

Erik banged on the door about an hour ago with the news. The President has ordered the arrest of the Speaker of the house and more than a few Senators and Reps have disappeared.

I guess tired of the months long cat and mouse game, the speaker sent out the Sargent in arms to arrest the President’s chief of staff for contempt of congress, but this time not symbolicly as it has been with all the other contempt charges for Prescott’s staff members. This time they were armed and they caught up to Mrs. Prince on her way home. A firefight broke out between the capital police and her private guards and Mrs. Prince was killed.

And now I am supposed to be packing. A Greystle guard is outside my door having just told Erik and I that we are to move into the lab until things settle down.

I don’t know where they are going to fit all of us. God I hope Janice and Sally are all right.

Alpha Update – what’ s up down there

/ staticsky

I get to spend less and less time with the core Alpha team. Almost all the developers are working on setting up Tangent. And some of the stuff they’ve come up with is amazing. We’ll be able to see divergents in real time. Not POV “seeing” of course, or even rendered snapshots but dynamic graphs showing the branches and offshoots of the data sets that comprise Alpha and Alpha’s Tangent.

I’ve broached the subject of what change the Alpha team would like to make that would trigger the change and creation of Tangent, but the concept of them playing “God” and manipulating an event on Alpha turns the meetings instantly into shouting matches. The team has become a bunch of Deists I guess, believing the creators of the world should stop interfering with mortal affairs after the initial creation.

I am noticing that my argument that Alpha itself will be untouched and that it is Tangent that will be the manipulated one is starting to sway them. Of course the fact that we still have jobs cannot be underestimated as a motivator.

Listen to me, this project has become too much politics and drama. I was going to devote this post to Alpha itself, not shop talk.

There are a variety of different species of our intelligent apes. Some separated by mountain ranges but in a few cases sharing the same valley.

As you’d guess most of the time they don’t get along, but generally the keep out of each other’s way. If you like violence however, you have to tune in whenever the resources are scarce then you’ve got theft, sabotage, and outright wars. It’s all too familiar.

Whether forced or possibly even romantic there have been examples of cross breeding. Leading, alas, to ostracized children that often don’t make it to adulthood because they have no support. If they do make it they almost always end up childless as they are often sterile.

They aren’t always rejected by their peers. Some often display gigantism or dwarfism like ligers and tigons (oh my). Whether to be used as warriors or mascots these unfortunate children are at least given a life with the tribe.

Technology both agricultural and martial has been slow to advance. Or at least it seems that way to me, one who has never witnessed the creation of a civilization before. Arrows and plows have both made an occasional appearance though. Flashes of genius that haven’t yet taken root.

Now to see technology we literally go to the other side of the world where our stoic little lizard friends have created wood analog computers that predict lunar cycles and even the positions of the fake little planets we’ve placed up in the skies. These guys are causing us a lot of CPUs. To make it easier on our systems the stars and planet projected on to their sky are our own. Alpha has our moon and sun. Even our Jupiter. Our already existing projections data of our solar system and night sky are just being loaded right into Alpha – so no new number crunching needed.

This touches on something we’ve discussed a lot over and over. While Alpha is often wondrously alien it also is very familiar. It is very Earth like. And by projecting our solar system onto the Alphan data we bring up again the most compelling argument as to why. Earth is our template. And because of that our rules and laws of existence create Earth like creations.

We have made Alpha in our own likeness. Heh, Janice would kill me if she read that.

It doesn’t really feel like Christmas

/ staticsky

No one had time to buy gifts (or really the money – shipping costs from Grid vendors are insane).

We didn’t have any decorations up.

But we had a big lunch with most of the original team together for the first time in a while.

I also gave Sally the old Star Wars toys I had as a kid and of course kept in my office. She was really happy with them, though she’s been playing with those exact toys forever – whenever she visited the office. Now she owns them and she thinks that makes all the difference.

And Janice gave me a kiss.

On second thought, I guess it does feel like Christmas.

Strolling on the Grid

/ staticsky

Erik (who is on the tangent team now by the way) let me scan the grid at his room tonight. His desperate gratitude at me having secured him a job is a little unnerving, but the truth is he’s a good addition to the tangent team and his research will definitely be helpful in taking POV to the next level. That is if we ever get a chance to work on it again.

I haven’t told Erik about POV yet. I’m worried about what Greystle will to us if they discover we’ve been hiding such a breakthrough. If it didn’t mean the end of Alpha, then at the very least means then end of my involvement, and that of Adit, Kaitlin, and Janice. It also means that we’ll be kicked out of campus and without jobs. With the way things are going that means tent city. Jackie points out that if Greystle gets a hold of POV they would use it in ways we’d find very unsavory. Of course Jackie says everything Greystle does is unsavory, but I don’t think that is uncorrected thinking.

I feel like I’m being a little paranoid using Erik’s ID on the grid but we can’t be having a person of authority on the project going to the news and opinion areas of the grid. I don’t want Greystle to think the project is lead by a destabilizer. I assume they’ll be less concerned if it is just a team member roaming about (I say now suddenly feeling guilty). I did make sure to avoid the more outspoken corners.

All the fake IDs Adit made for us months back seem to have abruptly stopped working. The government has announced a Grid crackdown to stop the destabilizing elements, and new security agents have scoured out a lot of fake IDs and took them off the Grid. Adit could probably make even more sophisticated fake IDs but he’s kind of swamped right now.

Janice was right about what is going on on the Grid. Traffic seems down. Interaction seems at a minimum. The news out there doesn’t sound good but it seems… edited.

God, it is probably a lot worse out there.

It feels like the old web. Nothing is live. A lot of text, little real/immediate imagery or video. It’s not that the Grid isn’t being used… it feels like it is being edited. I can’t imagine the resources required to do that, but it looks like it is being done.

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.

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.