Sally

Magic Markers and violent world

/ staticsky

I remember in 5th grade it was campaign season for student council & student body President. For the campaigns no one was allowed to use pre-printed boards, every campaign poster was hand drawn – suddenly the halls were no longer swimming in the smells of poor hygiene, but rather that smell plus Magic Markers.  You’d almost get a buzz going to the cafeteria. 

I walk into the office and discovered the smell of magic markers haven’t changed and I wonder if the giddiness I feel is from its brain alerting effects of its smell or just good memories of childhood.

So the supplies for the science fair arrived today.  And the Cela seems to be taking the “science fair” concept surprisingly literally.  Markers, boards, scissors, tape.  And if I was to make a unscientific observation but the nostalgia of these items has given everyone a giddiness and suddenly there is interest in this project.  Either that or the smell of magic markers also has give them a bit of a buzz.

A stack of personal slates had arrived, one each.  We all now have some access to the Intecela, basically The Sims Corner of the local grid.  There is a “read me” file (how retro) that let us know we’ll be getting wider access after the fair and any materials we develop should be place on our corner so that everyone can access.

This morning’s meeting started with the non-project statuses, because everyone seems to be jonesing to talk about what they’ve learned even it is things like the fact that two floors below us they have turned their cafeteria into an amazing curry place.  Hopefully we get access to move about soon, maybe after the fair.  Other folks say they’ve heard that there are other themed cafeterias and even hang out rooms on other floors.  Stan said there are a set of “pillow rooms” in the floor above us, which raised some eyebrows.  

Chen presented some posters he printed out last night, and they were not for the fair.  they were like tests for color blindness, in color you could clearly read “This Cela Sucks” and “I Enjoy The Outdoors What Abzu?” He had to say Abzu like “about you” to make the “joke” work.  It didn’t, it don’t work.  Chen’s idea was to put them up everywhere because unreadable if viewed with the B&W monitors.  Sam from anthropology noted that there was probably full time staff somewhere monitoring us, and with color monitors.  The B&W ones I saw were probably just a show of power, alluding to the archetype of surveillance being B&W monitors.  Lisa, the biology team lead, chimed in that depending on the contrast settings on the B&W monitors the messages might actually be visible since the color blind tests concentrate on hues and not brightness of the colors.  I think they were ganging up a bit on Chen, probably because of that “what Abzu” joke.  Chen seemed unbothered and noted he was putting them up around the office anyway.  Respect.

Now to the projects.  I asked if the Tangent team would be able to present today so that tomorrow we could get more folks on the science fair team and they said they were ready already.  If you’re just basing a presentation on hunches and memories of data, as there is no data, a presentation can come together really quickly.

Kim from Geology and Otto from Chemistry made the presentation.  Very professionally they started with a long list of caveats that they wrapped up by stating that their conclusions were basically “maybe.”  None the less everyone was in rapt attention.

We took what we thought was a minor change (7 millimeters) and saw the changes quickly and dramatically.  The “ape” that didn’t die on tangent kept leading wars and battles, changing a culture of a species that really didn’t have much of one.  Since we were looking at so much in aggregate we didn’t notice that these small things let to smelting for weapons while other ape communities hadn’t even developed agriculture.  The CO2 in Tangent was higher our “feelings” that storms were worse, likely were true.  Environmental lead increased, Tangent’s apes and lizards were getting dumber, their executive functions muted.  Quick violent reactions were more common.  Weapons of war became the technological drivers in the northl.  It wasn’t a feeling – Tangent was more violent, weather to war.  To say this is just a theory though is being generous.  There isn’t any data to point to – just memories of data.  Victim to the Big Boom.

There was a quiet, I didn’t want to call status to close on what really seemed like a downer, though what they were saying was fascinating.  Then from the back someone shouted “holy shit that’s a lot of goggles.”

Boxes and boxes of old school VR goggles were opened by the entrance.  One thing to say about Abzu is that they don’t have supply chain issues.  You put it in the Sacred Form and it appears the very next morning.

I got to spend a little time with Janice today.  We didn’t talk about “us” if there is such a thing for us anymore, but we did talk about Sally.  Sally is excited about her “field trip” to another cela next week, but Janice is rightfully terrified.  She is trying to talk herself down of course.  Sally spent a lot of the evening on her slate talking with her new acquaintances, friends?  Janice met some of the kids and briefly their parents, it all seemed normal even if the conversation with the parents started with the screen started with a disclaimer dialog box noting the rules of the communication:  No real names (except for the children), no discussion of what you or anyone in your cela are doing, no discussion of any personally identifiable information of anyone in your cela, etc. etc. The faces and voices of the adults were obscured digitally, though they seemed and sounded like normal folks and not like obscured witnesses on an old time TV investigative show.  Okay it didn’t seem normal at all, but really what choice did Janice have, and this all was so important to Sally.

Janice also said that Sally had skimmed what was on the shared slate, maybe I should call that the Unicorn Slate, and was not happy with Latin as a new subject. 

Over to you Adit – How’s Kaitlin? I heard she had a reaction to the cafeteria’s food.

Adit here – adding Latin to Sally’s lessons

/ staticsky

Adit here, Rob – I’ll be blunt – I know too much about you anyway, and it seems important to you that you keep a personal journal – I could always come up with a way to have another secure area, but honestly I’d like to limit that for security sake, not that I can foresee it being a problem, but just because I’m getting a little paranoid. 

Callout for your use of tabula rasa though – hilarious you didn’t think of me when you offhandedly said that.  Anyway, it made me realize I should add some Latin lessons on this slate for Sally.  I’ve always found it a good foundation for understanding words, sometimes it even introduces implications to a word’s meaning that are lost in its modern usage.

And Lady Jane Grey was Queen of England for 9 days in 1553, but you might know of her from all the movies, shows, etc. that bear her name.

Distraction does set the mind at ease

/ staticsky

As has been the case before, our team lives and relaxes by doing the work – work on our project (or project adjacent) – work they hopefully still love, and especially now when there is nothing else.  Again this morning, and I think perhaps every morning from now on, begun with the team gathering in our central area.  The status brief portion of the status meeting was indeed brief – as work on anything at all had just began. It was mostly teams announcing what hardware they need immediately and that for what items they would be filling out additional sacred forms.  

Next, and perhaps in reality the most important part of the meeting, was the status about – us.  Our people, this place, what we have learned.  Janice started by first thanking everyone who had volunteered to help with Sally, i.e. being Sally’s escorts, guard the bathrooms for her, etc.  And she made an announcement that got a cheer, Sally talked with other kids yesterday.  As much as Sally loves us and has fun with us, let’s face it we are all adults, perhaps not in maturity, but definitely in age.  So a lady named Jane (wait, why does Lady Jane sound familiar?) stopped by Janice and Sally’s room short of breath and told Sally she had rushed over because she realized that Sally had never been invited to the meeting which had just started. Since she noted Sally wasn’t online she had rushed over to let her know.  [there were chuckles amongst the team about this glorious example of Abzu’s high tech organization].  What meeting?  Oh, it was Sally’s introduction to some of the other kids in Abzu.  Sally’s slate (Abzu supplied, not this one) had been configured with the, get this, The Intecela – the Abzu wide grid.  Sally had more access than anyone on our team.  The call went well – it sounds like, surprise, surprise, the other kids are pretty geeky too.  None of them are in our Cela so Lady Jane (I’m sticking with that) is going to arrange a field trip soon for Sally to meet them all in person.  More cheering all around.

After that great news the meeting got pretty lighthearted. Chen noted that he and Erik had a chat with some folks from another group that works on our floor.  They didn’t tell Chen or Erik what their projects entailed because supposedly our team is supposed to go into the science fair all “tabula rasa.” Yeah, that won’t be hard.  Anyway they did let Chen and Erik know that our team is nicknamed The Sims around the Cela. While we don’t know anything about anyone, it looks like they know what we do, I wonder if they know more about what we do than we do.

The general reaction to the nickname was met positively by the folks that had even heard of the old game. When Chen started explaining the game he went off on a tangent about putting all the sims folks in a pool and then building a fence around it so they couldn’t escape and they all would swim themselves to death, there was an uncomfortable hush until Alice chimed in with a very loud aside “guess I better double check his code.”  Chen laughed the hardest.

“Sims it is” I ended the meeting with, and then called out folks to work on the early stages of Visual POV.  Kaitlin and Adit of course because it eventually will segue into POV but also Chen and Makda to work on a basic VR device so we can quickly get private communication happening outside of just Sally’s slate.  Makda is part of Kaitlin’s team and seems to have an affinity for retro-tech like Chen – once they have the parts we’ll have our private chalk board up and running in a day (or two)

I desperately want to talk to Janice about “us” and that seems incredibly selfish with everything else going on.  I just have to wait.  And how does “us” work in a Cela anyway?  The truth is this is a prison for us, certainly a very interesting one, but it is a place we can’t leave – and it is weird that fact seems to be normalized already.

I think this is why my entries have been longer and more regular – I have internalized I have nothing else I can do, which is a lot more restricting than my previous situation of just not doing anything else.

And Adit, this is weird.  This “blog” has always been a semi-personal journal, the fact that we are also now formally using it as communication between us makes it awkward.  Just wanted to put that out there.

Corrupt old jpegs

/ staticsky

Hey Rob, Adit still here.  

Visual POV aside, using “Sally’s Slate” for communication between us two works and is available now.  Given what was said today I realized having encrypted files on what is ostensibly her homework slate is a dead giveaway that there is something to read here.  And though I’m proud of the encryption I put in place, I’m sure they have the horse power and tricks to decrypt it in ways that I don’t know about.  So I’ve put a bit of security through obscurity up in here.  I’ve created an images folder of thousands of old Jpegs that cover any course work she might have, maps, photos of ancient structures, animals, science, etc. etc.  And a few of them are “corrupt.”  They scan as corrupt images, so no one would try to decrypt them, hopefully I mean, but why would you, its just an old corrupt image.  Those are our entries.  Though some are legit corrupted photos too.  The files go back to physical hard drive days so I didn’t even have to try hard to find some corrupted files.  

I’ve also got a lot of real classwork for her.  It’ll be good to get in the routine we had at the old place of giving it to Janice every morning for her to give to Sally, and then we “grade at night.”

Oh, and you might want to mention to the team that not only will we know what we are doing here in two weeks but we’ll need to start working on “it.”

Have a good night.

Cela Defined

/ staticsky

As we lay on the bunk beds earlier tonight I got it into my head that it was fun to say “Cela!  Cela!” as if I was Marlon Brando outside in the rain crying for Stella.  I’m not sure from what movie.  Adit let me know that it wasn’t as funny as annoying – and he let me know that cela wasn’t them being hip and mispronouncing cellar either, but rather it was Sumerian for “temple.” That’s kind of weird.

…

Okay, I think Adit’s been asleep for quite a while now, so hopefully the light of the slate won’t bother him.  I’ve given up on trying to sleep.  To be honest insomnia still kind of freaks me out now.  I guess I should feel somehow victorious that a sleepless night isn’t Orexinal but rather a brain that just won’t shut up!  The combo of being exhausted and not being able to sleep is, well, tiring.  

But I’ve got so many questions in my head from today, I can’t sleep, and I know I can’t answer any.  I wonder if I knew answers could I even affect change for my team and make this somehow better.  At the very least I’ve got to figure out if there is an “outside” place, a room with trees and plants, full spectrum lights.  Something to make sure we all get our Vitamin D absorbed and our circadian rhythms keeping the right beat.  Of course I’m probably thinking of pointless things because soldiers have lived in places like this for decades, and subs have been around for over a hundred years.  I guess I mostly want something like that for Sally, she needs some kind of normalcy now.  

…

Okay now this is really getting ridiculous, it’s going to be morning soon, and my brain is coming up with stupider things to ruminate on.  Like what if this whole place is an oligarch’s Anunnaki cult temple or something.  Tomorrow will I walk into a room with tapestries outlining Gilgamesh’s adventures?

 

Orientation

/ staticsky

Had two meetings today. One mind numbing and confusing, the other mind blowing and confusing.

Let’s discuss the boring one first: Facilities Orientation.

The most interesting part of this was that just two hallway turns away behind non-descript doors was a huge lecture hall.

We were told what the hours of the mess hall were, and that there are others but we need to receive permission from our Project Manger (Stan Winston) to visit them. A portion of the hall is open 24/7 for socializing (because formica and tile scream relaxation and community).

We learned about the requisition forms for everything from office supplies to bed sheets. But I wasn’t told where my office was (do I have an office?) or where to find these forms.

This presentation lasted 4 hours with one bio break. I think I reached a new spiritual level as my spirit lifted away from my body in revolt. That happened when we learned that there is no running in the halls.

I repeat no running in the halls. Well praise be.

After that we were lead into an adjacent room where a brown bagged late lunch was waiting for us. I realized that if I exited to the hallway from this room I wouldn’t be able to find my way back to my room. I’ve now declared that Adit must be my constant companion if nothing else for his ability to find his way back from anywhere.

When we were let back into the lecture hall there was a noticeable increase in guards. I’m sure that meant the next lecture was so boring that they were there to prevent us from running out of the room screaming.

And then my mind was blown.

This place is huge. We don’t have full access yet, in fact we probably never will but in the coming weeks we’ll get more and more access (if we behave ourselves). The entire facility has over 100,000 people. Though it is one facility there are many sectors: literal and virtual firewalls, biological filters. Gated communities with their own redundant systems. They don’t have emergency separation procedures, because these sectors are basically already separate; moving between them is infrequent and requires lots of red tape. Basically it is like entering another country; you’ll need a Visa. They call the sectors celas (Guess they’re too cool for the word cellar?). We’re in Research Cela 1 – catchy.

We’re the primary research sector (sorry ‘cela’), but there are others.

And then he briefly described the research done there: they’re building the future. As far as I can tell DARPA has gone big time with pretty much every other government research division (NIH has a secret research division) is represented here along with some universities. Greystle R&D is here as well and gets paid for their funding via rights to technology… I think. An underground and unaudited patent factory. Lots of money is going into and out of this place.

He tried to put a good spin on it, pointing out that the majority of projects was science for science sake, but I doubt that. They believe in cross discipline interaction, so basically after we’ve acclimated to the place we’ll be allowed to “mingle.”

And what is this place? Abzu. I thought that was a goofy name, but Adit just told me it is Sumerian for “primordial sea.” Okay, that is kind of cool.

The best part of the day was learning that Janice and Sally were only a few blocks away. Yes, each intersection of halls is a block. As stupid as that is that really helped me figure out how to move around the place.

Seriously I can’t tell you how happy in makes me to know those two are so close.

Afterwards Janice, Sally, and I started to play Go together in the Mess Hall. Yes there is a stock pile of games in the cabinets along the wall. Sally’s day was a guided tour of the exercise room and library. They have a huge online curriculum for her, but she said it was a very lonely day. She couldn’t get access to the wider Grid, so she couldn’t even message her old friends. Bur her spirits seemed high and she and I were a team against her mother. After a hour though we were just too tired to go on (it was a long day and nobody slept well last night).

I don’t know what the correct mess hall etiquette is, but we left a piece of paper on top of the board that says “don’t move.” I guess will see tomorrow if that works.

People Helping People

/ staticsky

You work with people day in day out for months. Some are friends. Some you have lunch with. Some you say hi to. And all of them are brave and good people.

I have never been more impressed by my team. I have never been so overwhelmed at what people can do.

One long standing item on my to-do list was simply making what we were doing with Alpha easier.

The set up for Alpha and Tangent required so much custom coding; even the maintenance required so many developers, engineers, and DBAs hands on all the time. Of course some of the work was caused by the ever present hovering biologists, anthropologists, ecteraologists wanting to see more details or wanting to test a theory.

But when you got down do it the code to implement much of the laws our simulation needed to obey were already written. I had always planned on making some of these items as simple to implement as clicking a button. A world creating GUI if you will.

Thank god for procrastination. We never even got to the point of spec’ing such functionality. The simulations we ran are as difficult and complex to create and manage as they were from day one.

If you want to do it again we are necessary. All of us.

Greystle has been very obvious that they want us to do it again. So much so that they got us all out of jail.

So we put that to the test.

Last week Greystle announced that the Simulations Department was moving to ‘a new location.’ The last pretense of this being a project from an institution of learning- being on campus- is being removed. We were also told that we would be in some way working for the Defense Department and that because of that we weren’t being told where we were going.

Then last Thursday Janice learned that Sally was not coming with us. She was devastated. I was devastated. Within a minute of Janice and I being told I the news I was getting calls from team members about what we should do about it (even without access to the grid news travels fast).

Our team almost filled up the old cafeteria in the student center and I suggested something that to me seemed ludicrously ballsy. We would strike. We would go to jail and not to work.

And it was agreed to quickly and unanimously. Janice cried, so did I, so many of us did. The team was a beaten group, and this was a moment where they would fight back.

Whatever Greystle is planning on with another Alpha project must be big, because Sally is coming with us (and so is my unicorn covered slate I guess). They folded immediately. Good to know we aren’t powerless.

Sally promises cookies for everyone as thanks. Assuming Greystle allows us access to cooking instruments (no knives?).

Unicorns and Rainbows for data safety!

/ staticsky

Well thank God for unicorn stickers.

Now that I “work” for Greystle on “their’ simulations project I no longer have a right to privacy. They are trying to rebuild the project and have gone through everyone’s rooms/houses/apartments searching for every electronic device that may be of help.

Basically they are praying that someone broke their IP rules and took some work home.

They wanted to look at the slate but I let them know it was for Sally’s homework. And without missing a beat they just moved on. I wonder if that is out of respect for me having once been in charge of this project or for the fact that the slate is covered in unicorns and rainbows. Yes there are actual animating rainbows on the slate I’m typing on right now. I’ll never call them distracting again.

Funny thing is the “device” that knows the most about our project is Adit’s brain – so much of it is stored right up there. I’m guessing Ned isn’t fully in bed with Greystle, because they don’t seem to know that he is Rasa. The fact that Ned is keeping that secret makes me forgive the fact that he never showed up at any of the court hearings.

Tomorrow I meet the head of the project for Greystle. My first question is what are we doing, because Alpha and Tangent are dead.

Meet the new boss

/ staticsky

Unlike every other multinational Greystle still seems to be agile, I’ll give them that. They can turn misfortune to their advantage. Well they can turn the misfortune of others to their advantage.

I had been feeling like we were a bunch of wage slaves for Greystle. We either worked for them on what had once been our project (a project of discover for discovery’s sake) or we could be let loose into the wilderness to search for employment that doesn’t exist. Though being near both Alpha and Janice is a joy.

Now the slavery is a bit more literal. The list of charges was ridiculous, our lawyer pathetic, and the sentence was draconian. Prison time for everyone.

Janice wouldn’t be free in time to see Sally graduate high school. I wouldn’t be out in time to see her graduate college. But longest sentence of all was for Alice who wouldn’t be out in time to see Sally’s children graduate. The judge and prosecutors didn’t take kindly to her being a black belt and actually inflicting at least a few damage points to some soldiers.

But was most impressive about our collective railroading was that it was collective. You didn’t even need to have come to our little riot to get sentenced. If you slept through it you still got 4 years. Being on staff or a grad student was enough. What few undergrads we had were expelled.

And then the white knights of Greystle arrived and all would be forgiven with such magnanimity that they believed they deserved another tax break. Actually Greystle didn’t look at this is an opportunity for good PR, corporations stopped worrying about that years ago. No Greystle now has a guarantee – none of us will go work elsewhere.

We can’t.

None of us will ask for a raise.

We can’t.

And we can’t seem to get a straight answer on how long our servitude will last.

All I know is that I’m not going to prison, Adit isn’t going to prison, Kaitlin isn’t going to prison, Alice isn’t going to prison, and best of all, Janice isn’t going to prison. We all can watch Sally grow. And be free. Though that word is a bit vague these days.

Oh, and I’m not doing my taxes on time this year. What are they going to do? Arrest me?

The Big Boom

/ staticsky

The explosion woke me up. It was loud. The glass shook and the smell felt like that it would burn my nose hair.

Next thing I knew I was outside in front of our building. When I was running across the campus I was joined by most of the simulations staff and students; we were pouring out of every piece of housing. I hadn’t thought of how many there were of us until that moment. And we were all sure it was from our building.

The troops didn’t run. They were already there. Blocking us from getting into the building.

It was if we were parents being blocked from entering the burning school knowing our children were still in there. The Alphans. Were they destroyed? The billions of simulated lives gone. Did some destabilizer commit the largest genocide ever, and not even know it?

Janice rushed the guards and was pushed back – hard, and in a strange moment of bravery or anger or – let me take a moment to sound lame – chivalry, I rushed the guard. I’m told I was met with a rifle butt.

I missed the real excitement. Adit dragged me away. Janice ran to me. Sally screamed and thankfully Kaitlin had the sense to take her back to the trees. Because the next think that happened was for all intents and purposes a riot.

A bunch of IT nerds and science geeks, made even more pale than normal from weeks of not being outside, rushed armed soldiers and Greystle guards. The only advantage we had was the few seconds of their inaction due to the fact that they were in a state of bemusement.

But they were old pros at dealing with rioters by then and we weren’t that adept at rioting. An hour later I was at the campus hospital along with a dozen others. I’m sure one of the soldier’s boots got scuffed.

Sally got me the slate and a bag of cheese curls when she and Janice visited. Janice gave me a kiss and a lecture.

Now half my face is a big swollen clammy weird feeling mess and I’m told that I’m a very lucky little project director because my eye is fine and my retina didn’t detach with the force of the blow.

But the truth is that the Alphans are dead, the project is probably shut down and every one of us is royally screwed.