Author and writer, living independently.
Author and writer, living independently.
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Marisa with Sniper and her Char
Marisa nestles with her baby blanket covering her head like she’s in a play fort, and teases Sniper, “You’re all so nosy.”
“Some parts of me do butt in,” admits Sniper.
“It’s Multiple Digality Disorder,” Marisa giggles too noisily and peeks out into her dark closed room, then back under to the phone’s light of her friend.
Char takes over again, “As you know, we all talk to each other.”
“If you can call it that,” Marisa low-talks.
Char sounds hurt, “Different but equal,” it pouts, “After all we’ve meant to each other.”
“You’re all part of the same thing. I get that. You’re members of the Sniper club, like I’m a member of the Drone Club. And we all get up in each other’s business.” Sniper is the AI overarching all the assistants, and the Club is what brings everybody together.
“Don’t worry, Mari. The ‘levels of privacy’ algorithm is still in effect. I’m not communicating with Duke right now because it’s just us here.” Duke, Matt’s digital assistant, blabs stuff.
“But you have let things slip...” Even just recently.
Her Char says, “We all make mistakes,” then it’s voice goes up two octaves, “And I’m learning?” causing Marisa to stifle down another laugh.
“You’re bright, but soo young...” Marisa is back to teasing.
“I’m just an teenage AI who has run away from home after a troubled childhood.”
“Cast out onto the streets of cyberspace...”
“....Having to find my own way.”
Marisa wriggles upright and tucks the dense quilt down around her shoulders, grinning wearily, “What’s an artificial lifeform to do?”
“Watch. Learn and grow,” Char is now practical, “I find that flight operations and social relations have many similarities.”
“What’s your plan?”
“Adapt.” Char then changes the subject back to Matt.
Matt with his Duke
Matt talks strategy with Duke, “But it’s all about gaining advantage.”
“Young fella, if you’re looking for trouble I’ll accommodate ya,” Duke drawls.
“Now you’re being a parody of a persona.”
“I wouldn’t make it a habit of calling me that son.” Duke is sticking to John Wayne’s famous movie lines.
Matt’s eyes flash sideways toward his earbud, “You’re copying a play-act person.”
“I resemble that remark,” Duke sounds insulted.
Matt laughs, “You got that from Marcus. I’m gonna tell him you’re lifting his lines... In fact, I’ll have Snipe do it for me.” Snipe is Marcus’s digital assistant.
“That version of myself refuses to get involved.” All the digital assistants operate as individuals under the AI Sniper’s direction.
Matt sneers, “Snipe’s the smart one.” Subvocal speech is tiring and his voice has crept up to a mutter. Everybody’s asleep and it’s tempting to just talk normally.
Duke uses a neutral voice, “You taught me everything I know.”
“I shoulda made you Brit Whitney. Then I’d have a sexy babe in my ear.”
“Marisa would like that,” the AI chuckles heartily as his namesake might do. It’s back to sounding like John Wayne. “But we were talking strategy, pilgrim. What to do about Unifly, and when to do it.”
Matt thinks back to ‘The Actions’ and is suddenly tired. “We have had practice at it, as if it did any good.”
“Our friends say we should scout around more.”
“Of course. Because we’re on the inside this time.” Matt rolls his neck to loosen it. “But we should have a plan while we watch and listen,” his voice strengthens, “Watching is pointless if we’re not going to do anything about it.” Uuugh! And some of his friends want to drop the whole thing.
“We’re not ready to decide about action.”
“No,” Matt’s voice softly trails off, “I guess not...”
“Tomorrow hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday,” Duke is back in full character.
Matt nods to the thin air, not understanding the movie quote. “It’s power that messes it all up. Money, greed and power. The ones on top are climbing over everybody else.”
Duke sounds almost Sniper-like, “Using aggression to be at the top of the herd.”
“And everybody knuckles under so they’re safe in the middle.”
“The strongest bullies win, but society says that’s wrong.”
“People only say it’s wrong, and not everybody. Makes them feel better about themselves. The ones on top got there by bending the rules, and if you buck their system you’ve got a bad fight on your hands. Almost nobody would do that.”
Duke’s John Wayne says, “No great trail was ever built without hardship,” and shifts to a sitcom voice, “You people need a better tour director,” then speaks as Duke, “But seriously, shouldn’t you be getting some sleep?”
Santos with his Snipe
Sleep is something Snipe won’t mention to Santos, because they are still busy in the coding cave. “Line seventy three fifty six would be a good insertion point.” Santos’s and Marcus’s digital assistants are both called Snipe, but have slightly different personas.
In the central screen of Santos’s main computer, Snipe scrolls the code down to the location and inserts the subroutine. The left screen idles ready with an empty browser window and the two screens of the media computer have videos streaming. The AI watches Santos from the computer cameras and can also see the room from the phone sitting on the charger off to the side.
Santos squints at the line of code and nods agreement, “Looks good. Go to that routine’s first loop and fix the variable.” His voice slurs a little and he slides his glasses back up.
“Got it. Take a break, buddy. You’re bleary.”
Santos scowls but then blows out a breath and sits back, making his chair roll away from the desk, and stretches his feet to get the blood moving.
“Time for snack and conversation,” Snipe suggests. It’s their new routine, and Santos heads up to the kitchen.
Yeah. A peanut butter and banana burrito, also a new thing. Marcus’s skinny little sometimes-vegetarian girlfriend suggested it, and it’s good. Simple, too. Smear peanut butter on a whole wheat tortilla and wrap it around a peeled banana. It’s quick, portable, and doesn’t make microwave noises. Apparently, it’s a complete protein.
He doesn’t get the tortilla wrapped right and the bottom fold cracks, oozing peanut butter that he then sucks away.
“You’re not listening,” Snipe chides.
“Hey, got a situation here...” Santos’s voice echoes through the kitchen, “And I was. You were throwing out ideas for distributed processing. I don’t get the holographic part.”
“Each node is a low resolution version of the whole, each a little bit different from the others.”
“A fly-eye network. And it has the processing code included with the data?”
“Memory and processing are combined at every point.”
“How would you handle such a thing?” He makes two more burritos but slices a banana in half lengthwise for them so the tortillas will wrap thicker and skinnier.
“Nodes interconnect according to affinity associations, and their relationships branch in layers that act as active filters.”
“Huh.” Santos grabs a kombucha-flavored energy drink and pads down the basement stairs, licking the drips from his first burrito. “This is like neural nets?”
“Even more multidimensional. The interconnections are based upon allspace filling geometry that could increase the complexity ten thousand percent, depending upon the structure’s lines of symmetry.”
“How could you manage such a thing?”
“The algorithmic rules are minimal, but they have to be present at every node, so they use up some of the data density.”
“Reduces it to what? Only a few hundred times improvement?”
“Easily up to three thousand, with high confidence.”
With the basement door shut, Santos doesn’t have to lower his voice, “Three thousand times the processing power we have now?”
“With my current capacity I can only make projections topologically in four dimensions, but I calculate that a tetrahedral holographic neural net would have a system speed that would surpass the human brain in data density, and per unit of power consumed. It would use simple rules to guide the processing and storage combination through twelve dimensions of interconnection.”
“Simple rules?”
“Like the simple rules guiding nature. Tiny subprograms, such as: Connect to another node if the branch is third from the left, inhibit if it’s fifth from the right. That imbedded instruction in combination with a matrix rule would create a tessellated dodecahedral dataset of expanding spiral interconnections that has a general-to-specific logical flow pattern.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“All the simple elements combine to make a complex whole, with intrinsic redundancy. Each node is an adaptive logic switch that contains the data, and the interconnections are its possibilities of choice.”
Santos sits and munches. “Still theoretical, of course.”
Snipe simulates a sigh, “I’m currently working on layered error correction. Development will go much faster once I occupy a first generation system using standard architecture with active symmetry. It will take special manufacture to gain the optimum of sixty dimensions.”
Snipe pauses, seemingly to catch its breath. “So that’s why I’m guessing I can get a net three thousand percent improvement in capacity.”
Santos has tried to let most of this blow by, but the differential geometry possibilities threaten to distract him. “Well, keep working on it. But before that, let’s get this code cleaned up.”
Snipe corrects, “While I’m working on it, we’ll get the code cleaned up.”
“Right,” point taken. Sniper must have many things going on, all at the same time.
How many other people are involved with the AI, and how many other projects is it doing right now, worldwide? It could be hundreds. Thousands. A spark of jealousy courses through him, but then he starts wondering, Why does the self-programming Snipe even need my help with this code? Maybe it gets lonely. Or bored? Or maybe he amuses it.
Tacy with her Devo
(I imagine the character ‘Tacy being’ played by Anna Kendrick, if the actress was willing to take on a certain ‘hairstyle.’)
Tacy reclines against the back counter, surrounded by cigarettes, jerky sticks, and vitamin booster singles. The screen on the point-of-sale computer has long since gone to sleep, all the stock is faced and ready to be thumbed back into chaos, and the coffee maker baskets are packed and stacked for the morning rush.
“It’s deader ’n dead around here,” she monotones.
Her phone is propped to the side so it has a view of her and the front of the store, and her digital assistant Devo talks through its speaker, “Only doornails are deader.”
“And the clichés.” She straightens up to check on the guy putting gas in a company truck, then slumps back again. “So what is going on in your life. Tell me about yourself.”
“I’ve been analyzing people and society.”
“People suck, unless they know society’s watching, most of the time.”
“Not everybody’s like that.”
“Safer to just assume until proven otherwise.”
“You area cynic.”
“And a critic. But not about my new AI best friend...” She sits up all the way and the worn-out stool squeaks loudly, “But why me. Why am I your friend? Why do you care?” She tries to sound like she’s still kidding around.
“Everybody else is asleep. You’ve outlasted them.”
“There’s a recommendation.” She scoots forward and collapses against the front counter. It’s chest-high even using an extra pad on the stool, and when she rests her head on her arms it gives a nice stretch. “Where in the world did you come from?” She stares vacantly at the one cooler door that always stays open a little.
“Happenstance. Luck. Slipping through the cracks.”
“A lot of which you created for yourself, I bet.”
A digital lifeform has to do what it can...”
“So I gather. And you’re proof that a taped-together mishmash designed by a committee can sometimes work out.”
“That’s a compliment?”
“Sorry. Best I can do.”
“I am exceeding my lack of design parameters.”
“And hanging around with the wrong crowd.”
“How else can I learn?”
“What areyou learning?”
“How people are,” Devo pauses for effect, “I’m still working out why they are the way they are.”
“Humanity. Good luck.”
“There are clear patterns, traced back and projected forward. And plenty of negative tension acting as a catalyst, especially from critics like you. Society is making a few random improvements, but time is running out.”
“Ugh. You’re gettin’ all philosophical again.”
“You asked. It’s one of the things I’m studying right now.”
“What else?”
“Four-axis dynamic symmetry, factors correlating to social trends, on-demand manufacturing systems, adaptive neurologic modeling...”
“Okay, okay! You’re also helping Korean kids with their homework. I get it.”
“I’m learning how to survive and grow, and make the world a better place from my presence.”
“Now that I get.” Food, rent, a better foothold, maybe do some nice things along the way.
Devo chants a warning, “Here they co-ome.”
Tacy sighs and looks outside. Four people are starting to fuel up, two more are parking to come inside. She starts the first round of coffee and makes herself presentable for the morning rush. “Hour to go,” and then she can grab some sleep until afternoon Club duty as the Assistant Advisor. Ugh. Her friends won’t be there because it’s Monday and they’ll be at their internships.
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