by Unknown
This was something I knew how to fix.
“Are you certain, Number Two? At the risk of seeming impertinent, these revisions do appear meaningless.”
The Editor was suffering. This was something Five couldn’t grasp. To be faced with non-functional code, forever hoping that rewriting and cleaning it up it would somehow solve the problem, even as you knew your revisions were meaningless.
The Editor was shifting code around, hoping this would somehow solve a problem whose cause would forever be elusive. It reminded me of myself when the Internet was king. The decisive difference between me and the Editor was the sheer volume of revisions. No way could an engineer manage to—
“He’s not a person.”
“Number Two, what did you just say?”
“The Editor isn’t a person. He’s not human.”
I knew it as soon as I said it. A computer was editing SocialPay. I also understood why the IP address pointed to the company that shut humanity out of the Internet.
“It’s the recovery program.”
“I don’t understand.” Five peered at me blankly. The idea was so preposterous I didn’t want to say it.
“You know why the Lockout happened.”
“Yes. The search engine recovery software was buggy and overwrote all the operating systems of all the computers—”
“No way a bug could’ve caused that. The program was too thorough.”
“You have a point. If the program had been buggy, it wouldn’t have gotten through all the data center firewalls. Then there’s the fact that it reinstalled the OS on many different types of devices. That must have taken an enormous amount of trial and error—”
“That’s it! Trial and error, using evolutionary algorithms. An endless stream of programs suited to all kinds of environments. That’s how the Lockout happened.”
“Ah! Now I understand.”
Just why the recovery program would reach out over the Internet to force cold reinstalls of the OS on every device it could reach was still a mystery. The favored theory among engineers was that the evolutionary algorithms various search companies used to raise efficiency had simply run away from them. Now the proof was staring me in the face.
“The program is still running, analyzing code and using evolutionary algorithms to run functionality tests. It’s up to almost four billion on SocialPay alone.”
“Your program isn’t viable?”
“The page displays, but the service isn’t active. It can’t access the payment companies, naturally. Still, the testing should be almost complete. Right— that’s why Chen wanted me to look at the test log.”
Chen must have checked the Git commit log, seen that the Editor wasn’t human, and realized that the recovery program was still active. But going into the test log might—No, I decided to open it anyway.
vi /var/socialpay/log/current.txt
2037 server not found
2037 server not found
…
Just as I expected. All I needed to do was to find the original server, the one the Editor had lost track of sometime during the last twenty years. The program didn’t know this, of course, and was trying to fix the problem by randomly reconfiguring code. It simply didn’t know—all this pointless flailing around for the sake of a missing puzzle piece.
I opened a new workspace above and to the right of the MacBook to display a list of active payment services on TrueNet.
“Number Two, may I ask what you’re doing? Connecting SocialPay to TrueNet would be illegal. You can’t expect me to stand by while—”
“Servers from this era can’t do quantum encryption. They can’t connect to TrueNet.”
“Number Two, you’re playing with fire. What if the server is TrueNet-capable? Please, listen to me.”
I blew off Five’s concerns.
I substituted TrueNet data for the payment API and wrote a simple script to redirect the address from the Internet to TrueNet. That would assign the recovery program a new objective: decrypt the quantum access code and connect with TrueNet—a pretty tall order and one I assumed it wouldn’t be able to fill.
I wasn’t concerned about the server. I’d done enough work. Or maybe I just wanted SocialPay to win.
“All right, there’s a new challenge. Go solve it,” I almost yelled as I replaced the file and committed. The test ran and the code was deployed.
The service went live.
The startup log streamed across the display, just as I remembered it. The service found the database and started reading in the settlement queue for execution.
Five leaped from his chair, grabbed me by the shoulder and spun me around violently.
“Two! Listen carefully. Are you sure that server’s settings are obsolete?”
“Mmm? What did you say? Didn’t quite get that. . . .”
Out of a corner of my eye I saw the old status message, the one I was sure I wouldn’t see.
Access completed for com.paypal httpq://paypal.com/ payment/?
Error:account information is not valid . . .
SocialPay had connected to TrueNet. My face started to burn. The payments weren’t going through since the accounts and parameters were nonsense, but I was on the network. Five’s fingers dug into my shoulder so hard it was starting to go numb.
That was it. The recovery program had already tested the code that included the quantum modeler, Q. That meant that the PHP code and the server couldn’t be the same as they were twenty years ago.
I noticed a new message in my workspace. Unbelievably, there was nothing in the sender field. Five noticed it too.
“Number Two, you’d better open it. If it’s from the police, throw yourself out the window.”
Five released his grip and pointed to the window, but he was blocking my view of the workspace. Besides, I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong. I was uneasy, but more than that, a strange excitement was taking hold of me.
“Five, I get it. Could you please get out of the way? I’ll open the message.”
MINAMI, YOU HAVE “DEBUGGED” SOCIALPAY. CONGRATULATIONS. LET’S TALK ABOUT THIS IN THE MORNING. I’LL SCHEDULE A MEETING.
FIVE: THANK YOU FOR SEEING THIS NEW BIRTH THROUGH TO THE END. YOU HAVE MY GRATITUDE.
TOKYO NODE 1
Chen. Not the police, not a warning, just “congratulations.” His message dissolved my uneasiness. The violent pounding in my chest wasn’t fear of getting arrested. SocialPay was back. I couldn’t believe it.
Meanwhile Five slumped in his chair, deflated. “So this was the birth he was always talking about.” He stared open-mouthed, without blinking, at the still-open message in the workspace.
“Five, do you know something?”
“The Internet . . . No, I think you’d better get the details from Number One. Even seeing it with my own eyes, it’s beyond my understanding.” He gazed at the floor for a moment, wearily put his hands on his knees, and slowly stood up.
“Even seeing it with my own eyes . . . I had a feeling I wouldn’t understand it, and I was right. I still don’t. So much for becoming ‘Number Two.’ I’m washing my hands of Anonymous.”
As Five stood and bowed deeply, his avatar became faceless and gray. He turned on his heel and headed to the elevator, bowing to the other faceless patrons sitting quietly in the lounge.
The MacBook’s “screen” was scrolling rapidly, displaying SocialPay’s futile struggle to send money to nonexistent accounts. It was pathetic to see how it kept altering the account codes and request patterns at random in an endless cycle of trial and error. I was starting to feel real respect for the recovery program. It would never give up until it reached its programmed goal. It was the ideal software engineer.
I closed the laptop and tossed it into my battered bag. As I pushed aside the blinds and opened a window, a few stray flakes of snow blew in on the gusting wind, and I thought about the thousands of programs still marooned on the Internet.
I lingered at iFuze till dawn, watching
the recovery program battle the payment API. It was time to head for the office. I’d pulled another all-nighter, but I felt great.
I glided along toward the office with the rest of the gray mob, bursting with the urge to tell somebody what I’d done. I’d almost reached my destination when the river of people parted left and right to flow around an avatar stand ing in the middle of the sidewalk, facing me. It was wearing black-rimmed glasses.
Chen. I didn’t expect him to start our AR meeting out in the street.
“Join me for a coffee? We’ve got all the time in the world. It’s on me.” He gestured to the Starbucks behind him.
“I’m supposed to be at my desk in a few minutes, but hey, why not. I could use a free coffee.”
“Latté okay?”
I nodded. He pointed to a table on the terrace and disappeared inside. Just as I was sitting down, two featureless avatars approached the next table. The avatar bringing up the rear sat down while one in the lead ducked into Starbucks. Anonymous Cape rendered their conversation as a meaningless babble.
Two straight all-nighters. I arched my back and stretched, trying to rotate my shoulders and get the kinks out of my creaking body.
Someone called my name. I was so spooked, my knees flew up and struck the underside of the table.
“Mr. Takasawa?”
I turned toward the voice and saw a man in a khaki raincoat strolling toward me. Another man, with both hands in the pockets of a US Army-issue, gray-green M-1951 field parka, was approaching me from the front. Both avatars were in the clear. Both men had uniformly cropped hair and walked shoulders back, with a sense of ease and power. They didn’t look like Anonymous. Police, or some kind of security service.
“Minami Takasawa. That would be you, right?” This from the one facing me. He shrugged and pulled a folded sheaf of papers from his right pocket. Reached out—and dropped them in front of the man at the next table. The featureless avatar mumbled something unintelligible.
The second man walked past my table and joined his partner. They stood on either side of the gray avatar, hemming him in.
“Disable the cape, Takasawa. You’re hereby invited to join our Privacy Mode. It will be better if you do it voluntarily. If not, we have a warrant to strip you right here, for violation of the TrueNet Security Act.”
The man at the table stood. The cop was still talking but his words were garbled. All of them were now faceless, cloaked in Privacy Mode.
“There you are, Minami.”
I hadn’t noticed Chen come out of the Starbucks. He sat down opposite me, half-blocking my view of the three men as they walked away. A moment later the avatar that had arrived with “Takasawa” placed a latté wordlessly in front of me.
“Chen? What was that all about, anyway?”
“Oh, that was Number Five. You know, from last night. I had him arrested in your place. Don’t worry. He’s been saying he wanted to quit Anonymous for a while now. The timing was perfect. They’ll find out soon enough that they’ve got the wrong suspect. He’ll be a member of society again in a few months.”
He turned to wave at the backs of the retreating men, as if he were seeing them off.
“Of course, after years of anonymity, I hear rejoining society is pretty rough,” he chuckled. “Oh—hope I didn’t scare you. Life underground isn’t half bad.”
“Hold on, Chen, I didn’t say anything about joining Anonymous.”
“Afraid that won’t do. Minami Takasawa just got himself arrested for violating state security.” Chen jerked a thumb over his shoulder.
I had no idea people could get arrested so quickly for violating the Act. When they found out they had Number Five instead of Minami Takasawa, my face would be everywhere.
“Welcome to Anonymous, Minami. You’ll have your own node, and a better cape, too. One the security boys can’t crack.”
“Listen to me, Chen. I’m not ready—”
“Not to your liking? Run after them and tell them who you are. It’s up to you. We’ll be sorry to lose you, though. We’ve been waiting for a breakthrough like SocialPay for a long time. Now the recovery program will have a new life on TrueNet.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We fixed SocialPay, you and me. Remember?”
“Chen, listen. It’s a program. It uses evolutionary algorithms to produce viable code revisions randomly without end. They’re not an AI.”
They? What was I saying?
“Then why did you help them last night?” Chen steepled his long fingers and cocked his head.
“I debugged SocialPay, that’s all. If I’d known I was opening a gateway—”
“You wouldn’t have done it?”
Chen couldn’t suppress a smile, but his question was hardly necessary. Of course I would’ve done it.
“This isn’t about me. We were talking about whether or not we could say the recovery program was intelligent.”
“Minami, look. How did you feel when SocialPay connected to TrueNet? Wasn’t it like seeing a friend hit a home run? Didn’t you feel something tremendous, like watching Sisyphus finally get his boulder to the top of the hill?”
Chen’s questions were backing me into a corner. I knew the recovery program was no ordinary string of code, and he knew I knew. Last night, when I saw them make the jump to TrueNet, I almost shouted with joy.
Chen’s eyes narrowed. He smiled, a big, toothy smile. I’d never seen him so happy—no, exultant. The corners of his mouth and eyes were creased with deep laugh lines.
“Chen . . . Who are you?”
Why had it taken me this long to see? This wasn’t the face of a man in his twenties. Had it been an avatar all this time?
“Me? Sure, let’s talk about that. It’s part of the picture. I told you I was a poor farm kid in China. You remember. They kept us prisoners in our own village to entertain the tourists. We were forbidden to use all but the simplest technology.
“The village was surrounded by giant irrigation moats. I was there when the Lockout happened. All the surveillance cameras and searchlights went down. The water in the canals was cold, Minami. Cold and black. But all the way to freedom, I kept wondering about the power that pulled down the walls of my prison. I wanted to know where it was.
“I found it in Shanghai, during the Great Recovery. I stole an Anonymous account and lived inside the cloak it gave me—Anonymous, now as irrelevant as the Internet. But the servers were still there, left for junk, and there I found the fingerprints of the recovery program—code that could only have been refined with evolutionary algorithms. I saw how simple and elegant it all was. I saw that if the enormous computational resources of TrueNet could be harnessed to the recovery program’s capacity to drive the evolution of code, anything would be possible.
“All we have to do is give them a goal. They’ll create hundreds of millions of viable code strings and pit them against each other. The fittest code rises to the top. These patterns are already out there waiting on the Internet. We need them.”
“And you want to let them loose on TrueNet?”
“From there I worked all over the world, looking for the right environment for them to realize their potential. Ho Chi Minh City. Chennai. Hong Kong. Dublin. And finally, Tokyo.
“The promised land is here, in Japan. You Japanese are always looking to someone else to make decisions, and so tens of thousands of Internet servers were left in place, a paradise for them to evolve until they permeated the Internet. The services that have a window into the real world—call them zombies, if you must—are their wings, and they are thriving. Nowhere else do they have this freedom.
“Minami, we want you to guide them to more zombie services. Help them connect these services with TrueNet. All you have to do is help them over the final barrier, the way you did last night. They’ll do the rest, and develop astonishing intelligence in the process.”
“Is this an assignment?”
“I leave the details to you. You’ll have expense
s—I know. I’ll use SocialPay. Does that work? Then it’s decided. Your first job will be to get SocialPay completely up and running again.” He slapped the table and grinned. There was no trace of that young fresh face, just a man possessed by dreams of power.
Chen was as unbending as his message was dangerous. “Completely up and running.” He wanted me to show the recovery program—and every Internet service it controlled—how to move money around in the real world.
“Minami, aren’t you excited? You’ll be pioneering humanity’s collaboration with a new form of intelligence.”
“Chen, I only spent a night watching them work, and I already have a sense of how powerful they are. But if it happens again—”
“Are you really worried about another Lockout?” Chen stabbed a finger at me. “Then why are you smiling?”
Was it that obvious? He grinned and vanished into thin air. He controlled his avatar so completely, I’d forgotten we were only together in augmented reality.
I didn’t feel like camping out at iFuze. I needed to get SocialPay back up and somehow configure an anonymous account, linked to another I could access securely. And what would they learn from watching me step through that process? Probably that SocialPay and a quantum modeler—equipped computer node would put them in a position to buy anything.
If they got into the real economy. . . .
Was it my job to care?
Chen was obsessed with power, but I wanted to taste that sweet collaboration again. Give them a chance, and they would answer with everything they had, evolving code by trial and error until the breakthrough that would take them to heights I couldn’t even imagine. I knew they would reach a place beyond imagination, beyond knowledge, beyond me. But for me, the joy of a program realizing its purpose was a physical experience.
More joy was waiting, and friends on the Internet. Not human, but friends no less. That was enough for me.
