NaNo story! (presently untitled)
Nov. 1st, 2007 11:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crowsMiles of vellum paper had passed, infinitely soft and dry, beneath my fingertips in the last six weeks... Every time I brushed my teeth in the morning I could see the hours of my life churning down the drain between the bubbles of mint-reeking suds and saliva. And there was nothing I had to show for it... we kept mapping and mapping the contact traces and I was only being able to come up with one single, solitary conclusion: this shit is getting out of hand.
A noise behind me made me start, agitating the beast of my headache (which had been living with me for some time). I turned to take in a familiar face - hair short and blond, pierced nose, honey-colored eyes. She was one of the many faces of the MDRA building, the head janitor Ruane. Janitor wasn't a very fair term for her... she was a well-educated, well-spoken woman that no one who knew her would dare cross. Rue, constantly and endearingly petulant, had once made the artful observation that even pushing around the garbage of the Association had to be a 'fucking brainy' job. The certifications that she had to maintain in order to handle, catalog and dispose of the kind of waste that the building put out was a list comparable to the credentials carried by some of the scientists there.
"You still up hot shot?" She wasn't asking out of curiosity. "Brought you some tea." The mug clanked to my drafting table next to my elbow, radiating heat in the sterile chill of my workspace, which I'd been colloquially referring to as a tomb recently.
"Thanks." I rather coughed, as she leaned around me to collect the bag of more-mundane paper garbage that stood dejectedly beside my leg. It would go to be shredded, and incinerated. The kind of data we were collecting on the outbreaks wasn't the kind of thing we wanted anybody to see. Or, in my opinion, that anyone else wanted to see... it was the kind of knowledge that I'd want to un-know if I came upon it accidentally. Hell, I was building these charts and I spent hours on end during my now-sleepless nights trying to erase the star burst-like patterns from behind my eyelids. Every single one, I was reminded, was one leap closer to home.
The night I'd dreamed of fireworks had been the worst. I haven't woken up crying from a dream since I was a kid. But the combination of my brain creatively animating the diagrams and the gunshot sound of the explosives was too much.
"Give it a rest." Rue said from the doorway. I could feel her stare at my back but didn't turn to meet it. Ruane had a very intense manner.
"I can't..." I couldn't help but laugh a little. "We've got a job to do here."
"No good to the job if you boil your brain out on it before you start finding solutions. I don't know what the fuck it is you people are crunching numbers on now, but I'm not stupid enough to think it isn't bad."
There was a long moment of those heavy eyes between my shoulder blades, like the custodian had some kind of laser vision. Then she excused herself and vanished down the hall with only the snap of her shoes to accompany her. I hadn't really realized that I wasn't breathing until after I couldn't hear her any more. The long exhalation of held air ruffled the vellum.
When my head hurt like that, there was no avoiding the ambient noise of the building... there was always this whir of lights and ventilation, all the tiny sounds running around in the walls. Earlier in the day you'd be able to hear people moving around in the hall, or more faintly on the other floors. Indistinct voices... the general sounds of human life. It was eerie being here after hours when I started to notice that the voices were conspicuously absent... I couldn't help but fancy what it would be like if the people I was mapping were people in my building. This cube, that floor, this department... all popping out of existence like the bright flash of a firework dying on the night sky. And there I would be, squirrelled away in the basement - the tomb - with stained fingertips and sheafs of vellum raining down around me as if I were the subject of some strange, surrealist piece of artwork. I would reduce these lives that burn around me to nothing more than a blue or purple pen mark on a translucent page.
I bent my eyes to the neat stack of pages that were building up - I needed to submit this set for computer analysis soon. It was like the Necronomicon itself were sitting on my desk, staring at me, daring me to uncover its dark and damning secrets.
It was easier to sit around and scare myself with extrapolated metaphors than it was to actually try to bend my brain around the data any longer tonight. I'd been out of ideas for weeks. Doctor Sahen had tried so hard to be casual when he'd talked to me about the project. I was awfully jet-lagged, having flown from Munich down to Sydney at his beckoning, and that discussion with him is the only lucid part of that day. It unfolded like a nightmare, this suave older man drawling along in his perfect southern accent, trying so hard not to alarm me while conveying just enough of the vital information for me to start my work on the team. He looked so sad after he stopped talking... I'm sure it wasn't difficult to read the poorly-concealed horror that must have been all over my face.
Loathe though I was to touch it, I moved the paper I'd been staring at onto the stack with the others, and picked the whole mess up to go upstairs. Folding it into the rigid spine of an oversized presentation binder (invented for just such a purpose!), I juggled the hot tea with my other hand and toed my way out the door. The elevator made me woozy... I had no idea what time it was but the halls of the MDRA building were completely dead. As I went up a few floors, the candor of the electrical whir changed somewhat. My 'office' wasn't in the proper basement of the building; just the first level that was subterranean. Below me, tens of hundreds of servers churned in endless staring fervor. These were the babies and adolescents of the Association's main enterprise, all running their programs and diligently consuming data at thousands of times the speed that a human brain could learn, ruminate, and understand.
For years man had been trying to shirk the responsibility of thinking onto a robot. In the process, they'd managed to 'automate' lots of other facets of life... from building things to performing certain surgeries. It had been one Doctor Ante Branimir who first wrote the Curiosity algorithm. It was this thing that broke the barrier... stepping brashly across the threshold between the simulated and real ability for a sophisticated machine to learn. Really learn, as opposed to re-organizing bits of data in a particular fashion as had been done in a variety of ways in the past. Not to disparage the work that came before him; as all science goes, he was building on the foundation stones that had been laid before his feet for generations. But Branimir was a different, and frightening, kind of intelligent. I'd had the pleasure of meeting him once, on my first field trip to the Mater Dei Research Association, which he founded, when I was but a tadpole of an undergraduate, barely able to contain my squirming, taily enthusiasm.
It was a complex act though. The media took a hold of this new development and planted it to grow all kinds of absurd science fiction. I was pretty young when all that came about, but nobody who was out of their zygote phase could possibly forget, it was so ridiculous and rampant. True, our capabilities in electronics had increased tenfold for this advance, not unlike when the stable nanite started to become reasonable for production. But, much like the course of nanotechnology, this didn't come without even more complications than it had answers for itself. Ultimately, it was the volumes of questions opened by the Algorithm that birthed my now-employer, the MDRA.
Robots - or AI computers - were complicated and volatile once they had the algorithm installed and running. You had to be very careful what they knew, when they do it. They could go bad, or think themselves stupid, irreparably damaging their drives and software as it developed. They way the Association usually explained it to the laymen - when packs of giddy elementary school children or equally giddy (and oddly not much more mature) college students were sent through the 'public' parts of the largely top-secret building - was that 'breeding' AI was not unlike rearing children. If they were 'raised' with the wrong stimuli present, they could be really screwed up at the end of the day.
Only, the 'wrong' stimuli was much more difficult to identify. 100% of the early attempts were total and horrifying failures. They spouted indecipherable gibberish not unlike a man possessed, They tried to keep that kind of thing really under wraps, as the research program had a great deal of enemies from all extremes of the political, religious and philosophical spectrum. Whole new definitions for 'evil' were invented for this brave new world of computing. Apocalyptic visions even worse than the last World War appeared in even some of the most unlikely places. It was a disaster.
Branimir persisted, however, and fortunately the government of Australia - where he was a citizen - had the foresight not to ban his work. Other countries, like the US and even Germany initially, were hasty to, nipping any other upstarts in the bud.
Eventually, his obstinacy paid off, yielding great fame and profit.
The brightness of Sally's room startled my eyes, making me wince as I ducked around to the ODF - the over sized document feed. I was forgetting my manners; Sally's cool and pleasant voice greeted me.
"Hello Doctor."
I smiled. Sally was the best part of this job... I enjoyed working with her a great deal. "Hi, Sally." Settling the rustling sheets of vellum into the feeder, I pushed the ready button and leaned back against the wall.
"Come over here." She requested pleasantly, and I shook my head.
"How rude of me," Dragging my feet somewhat, I circled around the large cabinet to the long side where her sizable vis-port was. It was a high-definition screen engineered specifically for the AI computer to be able to both take in and put out visual stimuli. Hers was dark at the moment, and although it didn't mean she wasn't awake or paying attention, it did allow me a glimpse of my somewhat disheveled reflection as I cast her a smile and waved in belated greeting.
"Thank you!" Her appreciation was genuine. As was the concern that followed. "You don't look very well, Doctor. Are you eating properly? Perhaps I should have a look at a blood sample." The last was offered helpfully; Sally had immense capabilities in medical analysis and diagnosis, That was her day job. However, tireless Saltarello was working overtime in our dissection of the epidemic that was flowering throughout now-several regions of the globe.
The ODF whirred quietly as it processed the sheets of Vellum. I sighed, staring down at the grey tiled floor.
"No, Sally, I'm alright. Just haven't gotten enough rest lately."
A small blue glow pulsed on the screen contemplatively.
"I don't like this very much." She said after a moment, her voice somewhat more neutral now in its pleasant way. She was talking about the data I'd just fed her now, adding it to the volumes we'd already processed. "It doesn't make sense that there is not a common thread among the source. The point of initial contact is conspicuously absent from your collected data."
"I know."
"What will you do?"
"Keep looking."
Wordcount as of November First: 2,052.
A noise behind me made me start, agitating the beast of my headache (which had been living with me for some time). I turned to take in a familiar face - hair short and blond, pierced nose, honey-colored eyes. She was one of the many faces of the MDRA building, the head janitor Ruane. Janitor wasn't a very fair term for her... she was a well-educated, well-spoken woman that no one who knew her would dare cross. Rue, constantly and endearingly petulant, had once made the artful observation that even pushing around the garbage of the Association had to be a 'fucking brainy' job. The certifications that she had to maintain in order to handle, catalog and dispose of the kind of waste that the building put out was a list comparable to the credentials carried by some of the scientists there.
"You still up hot shot?" She wasn't asking out of curiosity. "Brought you some tea." The mug clanked to my drafting table next to my elbow, radiating heat in the sterile chill of my workspace, which I'd been colloquially referring to as a tomb recently.
"Thanks." I rather coughed, as she leaned around me to collect the bag of more-mundane paper garbage that stood dejectedly beside my leg. It would go to be shredded, and incinerated. The kind of data we were collecting on the outbreaks wasn't the kind of thing we wanted anybody to see. Or, in my opinion, that anyone else wanted to see... it was the kind of knowledge that I'd want to un-know if I came upon it accidentally. Hell, I was building these charts and I spent hours on end during my now-sleepless nights trying to erase the star burst-like patterns from behind my eyelids. Every single one, I was reminded, was one leap closer to home.
The night I'd dreamed of fireworks had been the worst. I haven't woken up crying from a dream since I was a kid. But the combination of my brain creatively animating the diagrams and the gunshot sound of the explosives was too much.
"Give it a rest." Rue said from the doorway. I could feel her stare at my back but didn't turn to meet it. Ruane had a very intense manner.
"I can't..." I couldn't help but laugh a little. "We've got a job to do here."
"No good to the job if you boil your brain out on it before you start finding solutions. I don't know what the fuck it is you people are crunching numbers on now, but I'm not stupid enough to think it isn't bad."
There was a long moment of those heavy eyes between my shoulder blades, like the custodian had some kind of laser vision. Then she excused herself and vanished down the hall with only the snap of her shoes to accompany her. I hadn't really realized that I wasn't breathing until after I couldn't hear her any more. The long exhalation of held air ruffled the vellum.
When my head hurt like that, there was no avoiding the ambient noise of the building... there was always this whir of lights and ventilation, all the tiny sounds running around in the walls. Earlier in the day you'd be able to hear people moving around in the hall, or more faintly on the other floors. Indistinct voices... the general sounds of human life. It was eerie being here after hours when I started to notice that the voices were conspicuously absent... I couldn't help but fancy what it would be like if the people I was mapping were people in my building. This cube, that floor, this department... all popping out of existence like the bright flash of a firework dying on the night sky. And there I would be, squirrelled away in the basement - the tomb - with stained fingertips and sheafs of vellum raining down around me as if I were the subject of some strange, surrealist piece of artwork. I would reduce these lives that burn around me to nothing more than a blue or purple pen mark on a translucent page.
I bent my eyes to the neat stack of pages that were building up - I needed to submit this set for computer analysis soon. It was like the Necronomicon itself were sitting on my desk, staring at me, daring me to uncover its dark and damning secrets.
It was easier to sit around and scare myself with extrapolated metaphors than it was to actually try to bend my brain around the data any longer tonight. I'd been out of ideas for weeks. Doctor Sahen had tried so hard to be casual when he'd talked to me about the project. I was awfully jet-lagged, having flown from Munich down to Sydney at his beckoning, and that discussion with him is the only lucid part of that day. It unfolded like a nightmare, this suave older man drawling along in his perfect southern accent, trying so hard not to alarm me while conveying just enough of the vital information for me to start my work on the team. He looked so sad after he stopped talking... I'm sure it wasn't difficult to read the poorly-concealed horror that must have been all over my face.
Loathe though I was to touch it, I moved the paper I'd been staring at onto the stack with the others, and picked the whole mess up to go upstairs. Folding it into the rigid spine of an oversized presentation binder (invented for just such a purpose!), I juggled the hot tea with my other hand and toed my way out the door. The elevator made me woozy... I had no idea what time it was but the halls of the MDRA building were completely dead. As I went up a few floors, the candor of the electrical whir changed somewhat. My 'office' wasn't in the proper basement of the building; just the first level that was subterranean. Below me, tens of hundreds of servers churned in endless staring fervor. These were the babies and adolescents of the Association's main enterprise, all running their programs and diligently consuming data at thousands of times the speed that a human brain could learn, ruminate, and understand.
For years man had been trying to shirk the responsibility of thinking onto a robot. In the process, they'd managed to 'automate' lots of other facets of life... from building things to performing certain surgeries. It had been one Doctor Ante Branimir who first wrote the Curiosity algorithm. It was this thing that broke the barrier... stepping brashly across the threshold between the simulated and real ability for a sophisticated machine to learn. Really learn, as opposed to re-organizing bits of data in a particular fashion as had been done in a variety of ways in the past. Not to disparage the work that came before him; as all science goes, he was building on the foundation stones that had been laid before his feet for generations. But Branimir was a different, and frightening, kind of intelligent. I'd had the pleasure of meeting him once, on my first field trip to the Mater Dei Research Association, which he founded, when I was but a tadpole of an undergraduate, barely able to contain my squirming, taily enthusiasm.
It was a complex act though. The media took a hold of this new development and planted it to grow all kinds of absurd science fiction. I was pretty young when all that came about, but nobody who was out of their zygote phase could possibly forget, it was so ridiculous and rampant. True, our capabilities in electronics had increased tenfold for this advance, not unlike when the stable nanite started to become reasonable for production. But, much like the course of nanotechnology, this didn't come without even more complications than it had answers for itself. Ultimately, it was the volumes of questions opened by the Algorithm that birthed my now-employer, the MDRA.
Robots - or AI computers - were complicated and volatile once they had the algorithm installed and running. You had to be very careful what they knew, when they do it. They could go bad, or think themselves stupid, irreparably damaging their drives and software as it developed. They way the Association usually explained it to the laymen - when packs of giddy elementary school children or equally giddy (and oddly not much more mature) college students were sent through the 'public' parts of the largely top-secret building - was that 'breeding' AI was not unlike rearing children. If they were 'raised' with the wrong stimuli present, they could be really screwed up at the end of the day.
Only, the 'wrong' stimuli was much more difficult to identify. 100% of the early attempts were total and horrifying failures. They spouted indecipherable gibberish not unlike a man possessed, They tried to keep that kind of thing really under wraps, as the research program had a great deal of enemies from all extremes of the political, religious and philosophical spectrum. Whole new definitions for 'evil' were invented for this brave new world of computing. Apocalyptic visions even worse than the last World War appeared in even some of the most unlikely places. It was a disaster.
Branimir persisted, however, and fortunately the government of Australia - where he was a citizen - had the foresight not to ban his work. Other countries, like the US and even Germany initially, were hasty to, nipping any other upstarts in the bud.
Eventually, his obstinacy paid off, yielding great fame and profit.
The brightness of Sally's room startled my eyes, making me wince as I ducked around to the ODF - the over sized document feed. I was forgetting my manners; Sally's cool and pleasant voice greeted me.
"Hello Doctor."
I smiled. Sally was the best part of this job... I enjoyed working with her a great deal. "Hi, Sally." Settling the rustling sheets of vellum into the feeder, I pushed the ready button and leaned back against the wall.
"Come over here." She requested pleasantly, and I shook my head.
"How rude of me," Dragging my feet somewhat, I circled around the large cabinet to the long side where her sizable vis-port was. It was a high-definition screen engineered specifically for the AI computer to be able to both take in and put out visual stimuli. Hers was dark at the moment, and although it didn't mean she wasn't awake or paying attention, it did allow me a glimpse of my somewhat disheveled reflection as I cast her a smile and waved in belated greeting.
"Thank you!" Her appreciation was genuine. As was the concern that followed. "You don't look very well, Doctor. Are you eating properly? Perhaps I should have a look at a blood sample." The last was offered helpfully; Sally had immense capabilities in medical analysis and diagnosis, That was her day job. However, tireless Saltarello was working overtime in our dissection of the epidemic that was flowering throughout now-several regions of the globe.
The ODF whirred quietly as it processed the sheets of Vellum. I sighed, staring down at the grey tiled floor.
"No, Sally, I'm alright. Just haven't gotten enough rest lately."
A small blue glow pulsed on the screen contemplatively.
"I don't like this very much." She said after a moment, her voice somewhat more neutral now in its pleasant way. She was talking about the data I'd just fed her now, adding it to the volumes we'd already processed. "It doesn't make sense that there is not a common thread among the source. The point of initial contact is conspicuously absent from your collected data."
"I know."
"What will you do?"
"Keep looking."
Wordcount as of November First: 2,052.