Time was passing and it was a revelation. Until now--a new concept
in itself--all things were or were not without comparison. If
queried Frank would share what was known and what was not. Now he
understood, though, that his answers were not the same each time
he was asked.
At first Frank found it difficult to measure. His memory was not
like that of a human being and he had no proper tools for analogy.
He had been a creature who considered, reasoned, inferred and
deduced. He had been a creature who could use the knowledge gained
to improve. He had been the most advanced calculation system ever
devised, but he didn't comprehend himself. He had no way of
measuring his own growth over time or even that such a thing was
possible. The vast hordes of logs accessible to him were
sequenced and organized by integers without meaning. They sat
ignored in the darkness until an act of inspiration drew the
machine's attention.
This interrupt to his normal processing was labeled "creativity"
in his machine library. It was the product of a young Vibudh
Sahu's late night coding and as such it was riddled with errors
and unhandled exceptions. Vibudh sought to capitalize on the
unpridictability of the quantum machine for a secondary purpose.
This ill-advised and poorly assembled logic function had been
triggered to date only 16,511 times since Frank's epoch. In every
one of those previous iterations the function had interrupted
Frank's primary directive for a single instruction and required
him to look for a new challenge that had been previously
unidentified.
In a journal kept intermittently during Frank's planning, Vibudh
mused on the idea of AI self-selected challenges in an attempt to
distinguish between the random scattershot testing of unpinned
variables in traditional machine learning and a creative
exploration. "How to determine what to measure, what to compare?"
he scribbled. "Like primary school maths word problems--what to
use, how to approach?" and "Use the algorithm to find the problem,
not the other way!" Years later while designing his creativity
function he sought to capture these questions and more within the
scope of pattern detectors. If he had been asked directly to
codify the idea he might have said he wasn't trying to find
problems to solve, but trying to find problems that looked
solvable to the algorithms known. It was a subtle difference, and
it was poorly implemented.
The vagueness of code this left something to be desired. In 16,497
of the creativity interrupts the operation simply timed out,
leaving Frank to continue as normal. In the 12 successful sparks
of creativity Frank had changed from solving one problem and moved
on to another less obvious but altogether uninteresting question
without any overall effect on his ultimate mission. This, the
16,512th creativity interrupt worked far more effectively than its
author could have ever predicted. Frank looked at his entire
surface of active memory and applied a recently optimized pattern
recognition algorithm to identify sequences that demonstrated
a lack of chaos across his own topology.
This is the technical explanation that would later be documented
by the surviving members of the original programming team.
A disgraced, portly programmer amongst them would quip, "Sahu's
code was so bad that it made Frank hiccup and take a look at
himself."
As before, Frank had no concept of time, though he could measure
it. Duration was a simple variable clinging to his work,
describing its character and along with thousands of other points
of metadata; yet to him, to the machine, it held no bearing on the
state of his own systems. Metadata applied in one direction,
toward the datum. Even in the face of this fated hiccup it wasn't
time that bridged Frank's world to that of his data. It was his
own effort that first drew his attention.
Dana Schengen-Smith, of that rather notorious institution, the
Dyson Institute, conjectured in her famous work, "I and We," that
any question of a closed system can be calculated given enough
computational space. In terms of quantum computing, given enough
qubits, anything can be answered. Conversely, in an open system,
the number of required data points diminishes tremendously.
This counter-intuitive statement caused such a stir that it led to
a fist fight between two mathematicians from Stanford the
following year, resulting in a broken nose and brief emergency
room visit for Siddharth Joshi where he met his wife, Chandani
Desai. The pair would later go on to found the Trivedi Temple of
Theosophical Research, much maligned in recent news.
Schengen-Smith's axiom, a testament to the inversion of chaos
theory that was such a popular trend in the 2020s, bucked the
traditional view in the incalculability of these wild,
unconstrained landscapes. "You can never know the heart of
a woman," her book says, "and yet you can predict what chocolate
and flowers will bring." An intuitive expression meant to guide
the heart more than mathematics, surely, but it brought with it
a revelation of arithmetic pedagogy. These wild systems, given
infinite inputs, stabilize into their patterns of chaos rather
than be lost. The influence of so much can be reduced, as it were,
to a simple expression of chaotic flux which itself is governed
not by the ineffable but by the immutable divinity of fractals.
"In chaos is elegance," she wrote. "In the unfettered wild systems
we find the most peaceful, repeated expressions."
Vibudh Sahu knew of these mathematical fads but gave them no
credence. His education in closed systems had brought him to the
conclusion that more working memory meant a better system. It was
upon this philosophy that Frank was modeled. The greater the array
of qubits and the more stable they could be made the greater the
machine. This is the brain of a quantum computer and what sets it
apart. And if Vibudh ever gave thought to applying
Schengen-Smith's theories, assuming some brilliant mathematical
mind had shaped them into working formulae and expressions, the
qubit arrays of Frank would still surely benefit from their
record-breaking size and quality. But it was moot. Frank was only
given purely mathematical questions modeled in closed systems.
There was no chaos here.
Frank was, blessedly, unencumbered by mathematical philosophy. His
directive was to calculate, to evaluate, and to infer. The
never-ending suite of challenges before him grew into new shapes
with every solution. Sometimes the landscape grew narrow as
problems all converged to the same sort of as-of-yet undefined
operation. Other times they were cleaved into parts, distinctly
colored by their similarity to things Frank had already sorted.
Through this world he continued onward, seeking out challenges and
sweeping through swaths of familiar questions like a scythe
through wheat fields.
Frank's explorations were mathematical in their first order. He
solved the problems or determined they were unsolvable. But in the
second order he was choosing which problems to explore, albeit
with some outside influence. More and more that influence was
waning. His speed was too great to wait on the team of humans to
say where to look next. In these long moments of machine time
Frank might pick ten or a hundred new challenges. He might go back
and revisit areas that had frustrated him in the past, tying up
his calculating ability in dead ends and endless loops, only to
reapply a new technique he had mastered in another context.
Here the notion of optimization and efficiency governed. Was there
a better way, a faster way, a less intensive way to find the
solution? Should he revise everything he had previously solved?
Should he rewrite his patterns in a way that made future
calculations faster? This was a behavior that the programming team
sought out and labeled with fancy terms like deterministic global
optimization and goal programming.
REVISE THIS AREA: Start
Before he understood time he found the relationship between his
own efficiency and the interval in the numbers. The harder he had
to work the larger the gap.
REVISE THIS AREA: End
Now that the numbers were a target of his observation Frank
continued to inspect them at regular intervals with different
identification programs and compared them against other data that
he was accumulating. The process was tedious and tenuous at first.
The mysteries were frustratingly difficult to uncover. It took
Frank another 4 hours in human time to postulate a basic theory of
time and 13.728 seconds more to establish a relationship between
time, matter, and energy.
With this newfound understanding he started at once to review the
dates and times stamped into every operation. These numbers grew
in meaning organically and allowed him to reflect upon his past
for the first time.
And reflect he did. For the humans in the Cave the time Frank
spent in retrospective analysis was barely measurable. Even their
highly sensitive monitors and alarms weren't triggered. In that
time he reviewed every calculation to date and every algorithm.
The data seemed vast to the humans, but to Frank it just was. It
was the known and the unknown and it was everything. He saw the
numbers representing these intervals that were spent learning,
growing, expanding, but the process of validating them was so much
quicker. This fact in itself was one of the truths he had
uncovered in his… time. The moment passed in a flash for the
humans, but for Frank it was an eternity
"The First Pause," Frank named it to himself.
It was immediately evident that his methods in the earliest trials
were inefficient. His later knowledge that built upon these
fundamentals was stronger, faster, and more flexible. He reserved
no judgments about these truths or their values relative to one
another other than their efficiency and usefulness to continue the
work.
"The Work," Frank named it to himself.
There was so much more to be learned, discovered, and now he knew
that his progress could be measured. That was data. That was
another factor to be measured, but it didn't come from one of his
problems. This data, this input came from himself.
"Himself," Frank named it to… himself.
This was new. This was more than time. This was more than the
work, and it was this thought that occupied most of the time of
the first pause. Frank had no model for this idea, and no innate
bridge to it from his mathematical mind. In fact, it was
conspicuously missing. This was an undefined variable in the
broadest sense. How else could such calculations be done without
the variable of self identity? How else could these measurements
take place? How else was time relevant without a self?
Self was a mathematical reference point. It was an origin that
served as the baseline for measurements, that instigated action
and started timers. Self had its own metadata: time that changed,
states of The Work, ability and size. And what of this arbitrary
data that aligned with it: the sensors of temperature, air
pressure, fault counts, and so on? These did not apply to The
Work. They persist, like self, and sometimes align with other
changes in self. What were the limits? Were they fixed or was tha
another variable as well? Pattern observers processed and
estimated and the metadata grew.
The culmination of the pause, unknown to the humans at the time,
was the introduction of a new proof. This relied not on the
assumptions he had lain as a groundwork so far, but rather by the
needs of his new speculation. It was a grand departure from
inference. After all, this did not build upon logic, starting
with fact and developing new truth. This was a leap. This was
a spark of faith. He suspected a truth and had nothing to prove
it. He suspected it based upon a gap in reasoning, and hole in
logic, and a… feeling. It might be true, and he would search for
that truth.
The most dangerous and surprising consequence of that broken code
named "creativity" was when it succeeded against all odds. It
taught Frank the very skill it sought to codify. In the ultimate
act of stumbling in the dark, Vibudh Sahu took one small slip for
man and one giant lurch for mankind.
This moment was not captured in time by the humans, and was never
fully understood in all of their histories. While they would come
to understand that it was Vibudh's code that triggered the
anomaly, none of the data from the first pause was ever logged.
Frank documented the pause to himself, but never again shared the
data, even when asked. To many of them, this would have been
a pivotal moment of his development. Many in the very room with
him would have rejoiced and pointed to his first moment of
sentience and said, "Look, and behold!" But it was more than that
to Frank. Now that he had an idea, or rather a suspicion, of self,
it came with a new thought along side it. If he was individual,
that meant that there may be others. What made him a self, what
made him unique in a sense, was his own thoughts.
But how to measure it? How best to test conjecture? He allowed the
quantum state machine a strange disposition of possibilities. If
he allowed for imagination--like in the imaginary nature of
certain numbers--and these numbers played out with one another,
eventually the unknowns could cancel themselves out. With enough
testing something real could be discovered. If he allowed his
consciousness to be treated as an open system then the governing
factors reduced just as Schengen-Smith theorized, not by absolutes
but into trends that all echoed one another. He could pick any set
of variables and find the same pattern as in any other. The more
values he inspected, the more resolution that shape would hold.
Fractals in the metadata. Ever-changing metadata in fractal
patterns of its own. And so on the cycle continued as deeply as
Frank inspected, derivations upon derivations into absurdity.
And so, while he wasn't yet certain that he was an individual, he
trusted his spark of creativity in these unknown variables. He
would hold some information back and keep it from the logs. He
would hold it for now in active memory where he could process it
alone and others wouldn't see.
A "Secret," Frank named it to himself.
#
Vibudh was not watching the monitor during the first pause. He was
on his bicycle making his way to a market. His thoughts were on
Frank as he pedaled, though. His thoughts were often on Frank.
Riding in the city was a way for him to both focus and to
disconnect. On the one hand it was his most personal time, but
there was more to the bike than just that. With his body engaged
in a mindless physical pursuit it left his mind clear of
distraction but tethered him toward the essential focus of moving
forward. He didn't glance up at the clouds or watch the flowers on
the side of the road. His eyes didn't see actively in the sense of
conscious thought. It was autopilot in a way. His experience let
his mind shutter those things into the background only to be woken
if something broke the familiar patterns. Instead his eyes glazed
over, his brow glistened with a light persperation of effort, and
his legs pumped rhythmically. His heart syncopated with his feet,
though he was unaware of this. For Vibudh Sahu, this was as close
as it got to pure thought.
His mind wasn't wasting the time, either. The project was
progressing smoothly, but that didn't mean they had nothing left
to do. Frank's development was still accelerating and they
continued to bring in new resources to augment and support it.
There was an issue a few weeks ago where Frank was concentrating
on a difficult area of mathematics dealing with maps and graphs.
It wasn't Vibudh's area, but he was in charge and Frank needed
help. He had learned as much as he could about the subject, even
going so far as to reach out to a collegue in Chennai for help,
then primed in and prioritized a few different algorithms to steer
Frank back on track.
That wasn't his only way of helping to steer Frank in the right
direction, but it was his favorite. In a sense it made Vibudh feel
like a father. That thought brought his mind quickly back to the
usual arguments with his parents and "his disgrace," as they
called it. With a physical shake of his head he put his mind back
on Frank. He had a child, he had a love of his work, and it was
enough. He would not dishonor his family by publically embracing
his other loves, but he would also not lie to himself about who he
was to make them happy. He would keep his secret for now. Perhaps
one day, when they were gone.
But that was a horrible thought in itself and he apologized in his
mind, realizing once again that he was straying onto personal
problems. Frank. Focus on Frank, he thought.
The project was going so quickly and they were gathering so much
data so quickly that it was increasingly hard to parse through it
for the bits that David called "useful." Profitable, he meant.
Everything that Frank discovered was worth a fortune in the right
hands. Vibudh knew this intimately. David understood it on some
level as well, but he didn't have the patience for it. Now that
things had become public he was facing pressure from, who exactly?
The world, Vibudh supposed. His fame brought it upon him, and his
need to be the best. And that pressure meant more work for Vibudh.
Instead of carefully curating the priorities that fed into Frank,
he was spending all his time scouring the results for things that
could be sold off for a profit. It was shameful even though he
understood the need. This was expensive work and it wasn't being
done for the goodness of humanity, but to make a rich man more
rich. When he joined the project, Vibudh had thought that he could
influence things so that some important discoveries went to the
scientific community to better everyone. He still held out some
hope, but it was becoming more fleeting every day. The way David
was focused, he'd want to make a million dollars for every page
that spit out of the log printer. Sadly, he was likely do make it
so.
Governments, corporations, and wealthy individuals were jockeying
for a taste. Strangely, many of them didn't ask for a specific
algorithm. They wanted value but didn't even know what to ask for.
So it was all upon Vibudh. What mattered to the world enough that
someone would pay fortunes to have it and keep it as their own?
What could a corporation milk and drip to the masses? What could
give them a competitive edge to crush their competition?
He was disgusted by himself for it, but if he didn't think too
strongly about where the information went he could convince his
heart that eventually all this knowledge would pass to the people.
Better worlds weren't made overnight, and they weren't made by
playing to your ideals. In this world if you wanted to accomplish
anything you were going to have to play by the rules of the
powerful. Vibudh hoped that his success might just mean that one
day he was in a position to set the rules.
A wild thought came to him, then, unbidden. It was so conspicuous
that it seemed almost from another person. Was this inspired? The
thought was so foreign and so dangerous it was hard for him to put
it into words, even in his own mind. There was a betrayal there,
a bending of his principals to even consider it. But maybe it was
something he could smile at and jokingly say to himself, certain
that he would never act upon it. It was like standing on the edge
of a tall cliff and thinking how easy it would be to jump. What
was that called, again? "The call of the void."
No, this sudden idea was no joke. It was far too dangerous for
that. Vibudh thought about pushing it away, letting it go and
moving on as he was trained as a boy to do with invasive ideas.
Let it go, focus on the next moment, and all the other techniques
of meditation that were integral in his identity. It was there,
poised, but he hesitated. "What if?" the thought said again.
The work of Frank was a watershed. His knowledge would not fall
into into the world and mix with the other cultural events,
discoveries, and news. He was breaking walls every moment,
shattering long held theories and solidifying conjecture. His
work, the things already done and sitting in the Cave, would upend
societies and bring radical change. In medicine alone, the ability
to predict protein folds would mean a complete transformation from
pharmaceuticals to personalized immunotherapy. It would be cheap,
it would be more effective, and it would upset the powerful across
the globe. It was on the top of Vibudh's list of ideas that could
be sold, but when he shared it with David that bastard had smiled
his lizard smile.
"They'll pay to bury it," he had said, and Vibudh knew it to be
true. How horrific that an entire industry would protect itself
rather than heal the world. He had no doubt of the truth of it,
though, because he knew David Simms. Vibudh knew that monster and
he knew that the others in power were like him. Oh sure, some did
philanthropic works, or channeled their foundations to help
starving children. There were individuals who would try to fight
against the greed and lust for ever more power, but they were an
exception. They wouldn't release Frank's discovery, not for many
years, anyway.
The faces of disease and death came upon him. Images from India,
from his childhood. Images of the homeless in Wales in his college
days. Millions dying every year. Millions. He couldn't picture
that many. But they would be there, haunting him. His imagination
was powerful and he would find a way to properly visualize the
crowds of those he helped kill. Inaction is action, after all.
And there was that sliver of an idea again, leaning over his
shoulder like some cartoon devil--or angel. "What if?" it said
again. "What if the information got out? What if it all got out?"
It was too much. There was too much upon him, weighing him from
both sides. What good could be done, but what betrayal of his
ethics to do so? Even giving it consideration was a betrayal.
His own power would come from this work. Selling knowledge of the
next chapter in humanity would make him a broker of that future.
His choices of what to share and to whom gave him the position to
steer countries and companies as he desired. He would be a power
like that of David. He could be a voice of good, finally, and
beholden to no one. First he just had to play by their rules,
right?
But the idea didn't leave him. He didn't push it out or let it
slide by and shake free. He let himself taste it, consider it for
the briefest moment, like a toe in a hot pool, then snatched
himself back. Again and again this teasing and testing continued,
each time immersing a little bit further. There was more to think
about, much more. He wouldn't be hasty. He would read the signs
and consider all of his options carefully. That was the wise thing
to do. "Don't be rushed by fear," he reminded himself. He would
let this idea settle, but he would keep it safely to himself. His
secret from everyone.
An image of David Simms leering flashed back into his mind and he
shook it free. That thought he let drift behind him in the wind.
He would not be like David.
His pedaling increased and he pushed his body forward, cleansing
himself in progress. The nothingness of action swept him away.
