The Reborn

by Ray Mazza

  You were wondering about the computer in front of you, the one you should not have touched the inside of… (hopefully the residue from your fingers won’t cause the structure to warp from uneven dissipation of heat). It is a fully-functional optical computer. The sphere in the center of the heat sink web-array is its optical processing core.

  Trevor stopped reading and put down the note as he scooted over to stare at the computer. This is an optical computer? An optical computer was the stuff dreams were made of.

  Many researchers attested that it was the next big leap for computing. Present technology relied on the movement of electrons through transistors, which was laughably slow when compared to the movement of photons. Photons – or particles of light – moved at the speed of light, which Trevor had memorized in high school physics as precisely 299,792,458 meters per second in a vacuum… or 186,000 miles per second. In other words, very, very, very fast. Nothing could travel faster than the speed of light. And only things that had no mass could ever hope to move that quickly. Like photons.

  Provided you did have the technology to build an optical processor – like the one that was supposedly harbored right inside this computer – it would be at least hundreds of times faster than your typical PC. That explained how his program had run so quickly… taking mere seconds instead of hours.

  Trevor ran his finger along the top of the computer case, expecting its touch to imbue him with magical power. Even though he’d witnessed its speed, knowing the source of its power was intoxicating. He continued reading:

  These optical computers were one of the most revolutionary computer technologies we worked on. The one you are using has a processor from one of our earliest models, it is about fourteen years old.

  Trevor read the last line again. For the NSA and Day Eight, this was ancient history.

  You have perhaps heard some of the news this past year about the advances toward a viable optical transistor. Michael Larkin of Harvard has made the first one that is efficient. By using a semiconducting nanowire to confine a rippling plasmon to incredibly tight quarters, it becomes sensitive enough to an incoming light beam such that only one photon is necessary to affect a change in a control beam.

  That last bit even went over Trevor’s head.

  This is the exact method we used in our first optical transistors. But don’t mistake this for a coincidence. There is a reason public technology is only sixteen years behind the NSA and Day Eight: we keep it that way. When the world outside needs a push in the right direction, we help.

  Akin to our plant at Femptodyne, Michael Larkin has been on the receiving end of our influence, although he was handled differently. He likely doesn’t even know we exist. It works like this: One day, we send someone – let’s call him Mr. X – to a conference that Larkin is also attending. Mr. X finds a session that Larkin walks into, and happens to sit next to him. Mr. X, knowing that Larkin is pursuing an optical transistor, starts a friendly conversation in the moments before the lecture commences. Then, casually, Mr. X presents the possibility of using a semiconducting nanowire to do somesuch thing, and immediately laughs at himself, dismissing the notion entirely as tomfoolery. The comment is timed such that the lecture begins as he’s laughing it off, so Larkin’s brain has to switch gears and has no time to think on what Mr. X has said. Afterwards, Mr. X doesn’t even say good bye, he leaves the conference and doesn’t come back.

  Yet the seed has been planted. It could be a day later, a week, or a month when Larkin’s mind finally wanders back to the notion. By this time, he doesn’t even really know where it came from, has no idea he didn’t just think it up himself. And the more he thinks about it, the more it begins to make sense. And before you know it, he’s got a team working on it, and the solution to optical transistors enters the public domain.

  If planting the idea fails or if he takes it in the wrong direction, we talk to him again or we contact someone else. Sometimes we affect multiple parties at once. That is why you will occasionally read about an advance in technology that has seemingly been arrived upon by two disparate institutions coincidentally at the same time. This creates a healthy competition for quicker development.

  How do our human simulations fit into all of this? They originated as a concept nearly two decades ago in a brainstorming session regarding what sorts of intelligent system we could develop to help the NSA better monitor wireless transmissions. ‘Wouldn’t it be great,’ they wondered, ‘if we could create a program that would be able to go beyond merely flagging key words or phrases in transmissions, and actually comprehend the meaning of a conversation, and do this to thousands of conversations at once, rather than just one at a time like your standard employee?’ Immediately when the idea of a simulated human surfaced, the NSA knew we had something totally different, and they told us to pursue the technology needed to make it possible. Over time, the venture came to be known as Project Eileithyia.

  The size of our company doubled once each year for seven years, and kept growing. Our focuses shifted entirely to Project Eileithyia, developing human simulations and the computers on which they could run.

  Within six years – which felt like twice that with the non-stop hours we were working – we had achieved the first human embryonic simulation: Allison. Running on an optical computer, however, it was taking hours to simulate even a single second of her prenatal environment. We were able to speed things up by making constant improvements in the processors. But faster computers also helped us build ever faster ones. In 2004, Allison was reborn, and was the first successful human simulation to run at a normal speed. Then it took us a few years to put the finishing touches on a new paradigm of computer hardware (more on this some other time) which proved to run human simulations at much quicker speeds – many times faster than the rate of time in our own world.

  Coincidentally, that’s about when we found you… found your algorithm. In subsequent human simulations, we worked your completed intelligence modification algorithm into the actual simulants. They were able to study the algorithm and modify their own brains with it – the holy grail of AI! Intelligence that could modify itself to grow ever smarter! They would make different versions of their brains, mix them together, and replace their own with the most promising versions. It was a slow process to get working, but once it was, that’s when we started feeding them information, hooking them up to the internet, as well as digital book and journal archives… and they began displaying an aptitude that surprised us all. They gave us theories and discoveries worth patenting, as you saw.

  Only very recently have they evolved to the point where the bug in your program had begun to affect them. One day we came in, and a simulation was essentially brain dead – it had crashed its own brain trying to swap it with a non-functional version. You’d think it would be smart enough not to do that, but when we looked at its history, we realized its brain had deteriorated so drastically in an incredibly short amount of time that it had become mentally disabled before finally crashing itself. At first, we thought it was a fluke, but soon, countless other simulations began crashing their brains as well.

  This is your bug. We’ve had to instruct the simulations not to make use of your algorithm until we fix it. They’re at an intellectual stand-still until we do.

  Now, it was probably apparent that I’ve had an ulterior motive for bringing you here. This is it.

  You ask why we did not just have the simulations look for the bug in the code and fix it themselves. Honestly, we didn’t want them to know the bug existed. We’ve assured them what they are doing to themselves is safe. If they knew about the bug, then they would never trust this code. A few witnessed the problem occur in their friends, and those few have ceased to be of any use to us. Think about it. If you were them, would you modify yourself using a mechanism that had a slight chance of leaving you brain-dead? Or would you allow it to be unleashed onto others of your kind? You see why you must fix this.

  Damon.

  PS – I should
not have to tell you to refrain from discussing any of this with anyone. However, in the event that all of this goes south and you are contacted by the US intelligence community, do not tell them about the human simulations. They do not, and cannot, know. The NSA thinks we failed in all our attempts thus far with Project Eileithyia and that we are still trying.

  Trevor slid the final sheet of stationery to the side, revealing a small envelope underneath. It read:

  Open only once you’ve fixed your bug.

  He flipped it over. A golden sticker bearing an embossed “8” sealed the envelope. If he wanted, he could carefully peel back the sticker and investigate the contents of the envelope now, then reseal it. He was tempted… thirsty to know more.

  No matter how much he found out, no matter what incredible things Damon described to him, Trevor couldn’t shake the unsettling feeling that he had only scratched the surface of a towering vault that guarded the world’s most precious secrets.

  Trevor leaned back and glanced casually around the room, noticing another of Damon’s cameras nestled in a high corner. Reluctantly, Trevor set the envelope aside, anticipating the moment when he could tear it open. The NSA, optical computers, self-modifying human simulations, a new form of hardware even faster than optical processors that could run the simulations at full speed… it was beginning to fit together, and at this point, he was willing to believe just about anything.

  Trevor looked around him. There had been times when he felt that things were too normal for him. That he was leading a plebian life as a necessary counterbalance to the other, more obscured side of the world. He’d known that there was a clandestine community out there, somewhere, comprised of secret societies, hidden government subterfuge, and billion-dollar classified intellectual triumphs preciously guarded in covert bunkers… bunkers much like this one.

  Trevor was now a part of this clandestine community. His life had become anything but normal.

  Trevor made his way to the couch and tossed his body across it. He rested his head on a pillow, nestled himself against the puffy back, and put his feet up on the arm. This would not be a computer bug he’d be able to fix by looking at code. Rather, he’d have to work it out in his mind while letting all this information settle in.

  Thoughts of circuits growing, connecting, reproducing, and dying played out in his head. He relaxed his eyes and closed them to better visualize the problem. His pulse slowed and his mental state began to shift. In a realm that was stranded halfway between wakefulness and sleep, abstract images of circuits morphing into brains flitted in and out of his consciousness. His mind wandered deeper. The time between his breaths became longer. His pulse slowed. Soon, he was fast asleep.

  ~

  Trevor woke, sprang from the couch, paced back and forth to the computer, then slapped his hands.

  “That’s it!” he said. Allison clapped for him because he sounded excited, and that made him smile. She had just finished watching Robin Hood, so he put in another colorful movie for her, then engrossed himself in computer code before the answer escaped him.

  The problem with it was that his program dealt primarily with circuits, but was trying to build brains. One fundamental difference was that circuits processed information linearly – there were very specific paths that a signal traveled in a chip, and it essentially operated on one piece of data at a time each step of the way. Yet brains processed information in parallel: various signals moved about the brain in unison and it operated on them all at once in a constant storm of activity.

  Early forms of life had nervous systems that functioned more like circuits. Worms had a segment of the brain for movement, another tasked for eating, a third for sensing surroundings. These were independent, but over time, ganglia like these had become more intertwined, developing a parallel nervous architecture, approaching the more connected structures of our brains today.

  Trevor needed to take this dichotomy between the linearity of circuits and the parallelism of brains into account in his program. This was a fundamental problem that Trevor never foresaw because he had always thought he was working on circuits… not human neural structures. And it was no surprise Kane or whoever else at Day Eight couldn’t fix the bug, because they were looking for a flaw in programming logic. But it wasn’t a bug in that sense. It was an entire shift in approach to realign the algorithm with the problem space.

  The algorithm had come from within Trevor, so he could grasp its entirety when nobody else could. But that wasn’t all of it… something had changed while he had been asleep; his mind had shifted like a tectonic plate and done the work of countless thinkers.

  He just knew the answer.

  ~

  Four hours later, Trevor’s fingers hurt from typing so quickly and constantly. His burnt finger throbbed, but he didn’t care. He’d become a whirlwind of programming. It gave him his own sort of high that rendered mild physical pain insignificant.

  He had a few false starts, but now the program ran flawlessly. There were no crashes after a few seconds. There were no crashes after an hour. And the results were astounding. He’d never seen output so complex, so interesting. Damon would be thrilled, and the simulants could go back to artificially modifying their own intelligence.

  Now, it was time to open the envelope.

  Trevor carefully peeled back the golden sticker with the embossed “8,” as if tearing it would destroy the contents of the envelope.

  He gently slid out a folded sheet of stationery, different than the kind on the desk. The paper was wider than it was tall. A very faint, sideways “8” adorned the extent of its surface. Damon’s familiar script looped across and down the page. The note began:

  It is time you spoke with Ezra.

  ~

  To be continued in Day Eight, Part II:

  Of Mice and Hitmen

  Thank you for reading Day Eight, Part I: The Reborn

  Please keep in mind that this was only the first part in a three-part novel. If you’re wondering why things didn’t wrap up nicely, it’s because the action is really just beginning…

  I hope you’ve enjoyed the book so far. I’m excited about where it all leads. If you’d like to find out, you can find the other two books on Amazon.

  Part II is titled, Of Mice and Hitmen.

  Part III is titled, The Spiritual Singularity.

  You may also find them via this top-secret link:

  http://www.raymazza.com/novels.html

  As always, if you want to send comments, feedback, or cupcakes, please mail these things to dayeight@raymazza.com. I would love to hear from you!

  If you want to check out the acknowledgements, keep flipping pages (and I thank you at the end of them).

  Happy Reading!

  Acknowledgements

  (I thank YOU at the bottom.)

  Many people are incredible. Foremost are those who go out of their way to help others. Here are some of the people who have given their invaluable time and energy to help make the Day Eight series so much better than I could have produced alone.

  First, Laura, my wonderful wife, for reading multiple versions of the manuscript and giving me not just logical notes, but emotional feedback as well. And also for convincing me to finish when I had only completed the first part of the book – I wouldn’t have persevered otherwise.

  Second, my parents, for cultivating in me an endless hunger for creativity, a connection to books, and a critical mind.

  And Ira Fay for being the first reader of the full manuscript and providing honest feedback which led to large changes, all for the better. And for his intellectual company during our Irazza/Firazza lunches.

  Eric & Clarissa Holmberg-Weidler for their copious notes, chapter ratings, and enthusiasm.

  Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, for the best editorial notes and militant eye for trimming language to be short and vigorous.

  Barbara Thomason for motivating me and catching the most tricky errors and typos in the manuscript.

 
Shawn Patton for a great, honest review and comparison to Neal Stephenson (the story, not my prose!).

  Aaron Houts and David Saslav for their useful insights and conversations.

  The Nanowrimo for getting me over the first hurdle. It was the worst of my writing and needed lots of rework, but it was also the most important. Without it, I would be novel-less.

  And you! Yes, you, my dedicated reader! Thank you for trusting me with your time and attention. I hope I’ve shared not only an exciting story, but also (if you’ve read all three parts) given you moments of reflection on what it means to be human, where we came from, the meaning of existence, and where technology and humanity might be headed. In other words, I hope I have changed you – if only in some small way – for the better. Or the deeper.

  And I hope to do it again.

  Which is why I would love to know what you thought! Please email me at dayeight@raymazza.com. I promise I will read your mail and take it to heart. And who knows? If I have words in me, maybe I’ll respond!