Project

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’s a blur but it has become routine

/ staticsky

Day after day it happens so quickly, generally when I have a tooth brush in my mouth, the Greystle hired guard picks me up. Usually it is someone I don’t recognize and they rarely give me their name.

We walk through campus and the students and refugees give us death stares. Outside the lab the gal from the roach coach hands me the stack of food that will be my meals for the day, and then I try to ignore all the construction folks walking down the stairs to the new floor (floors?) below the server farm. We’ve got the whole building to ourselves now with several floors being stocked with the new equipment and working space for the new staff.

Then the meetings start. First the Tangent meeting. The big topic that is being studied now is how best to get the Tangent Alpha up online so the branching can begin and once it does begin how will we track the branching. We have the systems and staff ready; we just need to make sure we get the start down right because in the end that is the thing, after that we step back and watch it go.

After that marathon of timetables and logistics comes a quick lunch as I walk down to my old office and meet with the heads of the Alpha project.

The first half hour is generally complaints and questions, neither of which I can address. Because I don’t know anything and outside of the actual project I can’t “do” anything. The rest of the meeting is the only moments of wonder left in my day. Each group shares with the team their newest discoveries, questions, and answers that they have come across in their past day’s dig into Alpha. Then the project heads makes their requests for equipment and staff that I deny. Tangent Alpha gets all of it now.

The team has become very agile though with loaning each other staff back and forth as needed. And each team has devoted a staff member to by fully dedicated to optimizing the snapshot data now that Adit’s software team has been pulled completely on to Tangent. Because of their work the team has been able to have the data necessary to be able to back track trends as their significance becomes apparent. A minor change in diet from a few days ago can be brought to light when the jaw structure change in the dominant primate leads to an increase in miscarriages in the species. That was an impressive piece of detective work. I’m so proud of them but it is apparent I’m not really necessary any more but luckily no one ever brings that up and I get to bask in the reflective glory of discovery for 90 minutes.

Next comes the Everest of my daily meetings. Status with Greystle. This isn’t a university project any more this is a Greystle project. Even my bank alert now says the daily paychecks are coming from Dulles Scientific Consulting and not the university. I asked around and it looks like DSC was formed a few weeks ago and has no official affiliation with the university even though we all live and work in the university and the company has the same name as the university. I’m now a part of Greystle I guess, and I didn’t even get a welcome package from HR. Adit wrote an agent for the team that takes everyone’s daily deposits and converts them to a variety of different denominations based on the day’s exchange rate. It has been a great hedge against the hyper inflation.

Then I use what remains of my energy keeping up with the actual business of managing this project. That consists of Grid forms and apps flying by while I eat my dinner. Before I get close to feeling I have a handle on what is going on a guard will come and take my back to my room.

I cross the campus and notice again, as I do every night, that glow in the dark frisbee and teens coming back from dates have been replaced by tent cities with bonfires to keep everyone warm. I actually saw a campus security guard today… he hurried away when he saw me and my “escort.”

And night after night I collapse onto my bed even before I brush my teeth or change. Except tonight – tonight I actually got to write an update. I want to see if I can do this more often.

It is all a blur and seeing it in words allows me to focus it and I don’t like what I see.

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.

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.

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.

A new member of our motley crew

/ staticsky

Today I interviewed the soon to be newest member of Adit’s software team. He’s a freak and will fit right in.

Stan Chen is a theoretical physicist. Alpha though isn’t theoretical nor is the software that runs it. No, we need Chen to work out the physics of Alpha in even more detail; really we need to know better about what we can hide.

Alpha is possible with our equipment because of Jack and Adit’s “quantum compression” that renders information only when needed. This could be because of us wanting to see data on what is happening in Alpha or something interacts with something else on Alpha.

Since for millions and millions of Alphan years the interactions on Alpha were simply physical (volcanoes, cooling plates, ocean waves, etc) and mathematically predictable this tactic saved us a lot of horse power.

But as Alphans appeared, be it slime, bugs, or mammals, our rendering has been continuous as all these independent beings interact, observe, and evolve. Our rendering speed has gone from millions of years or more a day to less than a few hundred thousand a day (at the most).

We need to come up with more efficient rules to save on cpu queries. Chen could let us use the latest theories on the behavior of macro and micro physics (we have got Newton covered) and basically come up with ways for us to cheat. Because the day is coming when we’ll have animals that might notice more than just the movement of the sun and stars but perhaps study them and we’ve got to make sure we have a bit more there… there.

Chen’s CV is perfect but I had heard that he hadn’t been able to hold any one position for long. The fact that he’d found other projects to work on after being kicked off of others is an unfortunate proof of his abilities.Chen seemed to be relieved that I had asked so bluntly about his problems holding down a job. He blamed it on his episodes. Every few weeks Chen loses a day of work because he has had a temporal lobe seizure. He is epileptic. The “episodes” as he calls them only last a few minutes but the experience wipes him out for at least a day. It drains him physically and mentally, and he pretty much has to sleep the day away.Previous employers refused to accept this excuse because Chen himself refused to take medication. Without going into detail I assured him that I was very understanding of those who wanted to avoid medication and as long as Adit’s team’s work wasn’t hindered by his occasional absences then there shouldn’t be any problem with him joining us on the simulation projects. And then he pushed it and explained why he doesn’t take medication. And if I had any doubts about him before this, this put them to rest. This guy was a nut but the type of nut that would be perfect for this project.

He didn’t believe he had a disease per se, but rather he was somehow wired differently and that allowed him to occasionally crossover into other universes. Seriously.

When he has an episode he has brief flashes of memories of things that did not actually happen. Not wild dream like scenes, but realistic scenarios of trips with friends or dinner at certain restaurants. But he also consciously knows as he experiences these memories that they are not actually his. The experience he has is disconcerting, confusing, and physically draining. Deja vu with an attitude. But he doesn’t think these are just false memories that are a byproduct of a bunch on neurons firing randomly but that they are real memories. Memories from a different him.

Chen is a strong proponent of the multiverse theory where our reality is actually just a small sideways glance at what truly exists. Our universe is just the view from one point on the shore of an infinite ocean. And infinite other points of this shore are infinite other versions of our lives, even our lives without us. Chen goes so far as to believe that every probability created from the movement of an atomic particle exists. An infinite number of universes with Earth, an infinite number with Earth but not me (sucks to be me), an infinite number with me but with me still having my beard. Etc. An infinite number of infinites.

With all these universes occasionally energies can cross over and be detected, though not necessarily understood. It could be the Voyagers mysteriously slowing down as they left our solar system or it could explain the nonexistent mass that is dark matter and even dark energy. Or, as Chen explains to me, it could be thoughts that occasionally cross over from different versions of yourself. Memory leaks (now I know he’d be perfect from software design).

He calls this phenomenon a Mental Teseract. I tell him to keep it himself for now.

That said maybe when things calm down around here his idea will be a great dinnertime conversation piece.

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.

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.

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.

Life in a poison world

/ staticsky

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.”