Pacifica Ascendant: A Postmodern Saga (IC, Invitation only)

[Lagunaca]

---

Bruce gets a taste of chatroom culture

Recommended listening: The Mighty Boosh – BBC Comedy, “Eels Song” (Lyrics)

What Bruce didn’t realize was that Grayson was having a text conversation with Jeff The Ancient Hipster about Bruce, while he was talking to Bruce about L-CID and Typhon. The general synopsis of Grayson’s side of the exchange was, “Somebody’s dad who crashed the party is asking dumb questions like a narc.”

The message was on Grayson’s public Discord chat, but then someone submitted it to Twitch and a lot of the other devs started chiming in in the chat about seeing Bruce around town at night. And then the chat inevitably devolved when someone commented (baselessly) that he must be some kind of perv. One of Cambria’s garbage men who happened to be on the Twitch channel joined in, defending Bruce against the false perv allegations by saying Bruce had approached him as a lifestyle reporter from a big city news channel and he was doing some boring article about class warfare in resort towns. That wasn’t much of an endorsement with this group, and to make matters worse, it exposed the mismatch in Bruce’s new cover story. Which led somebody to get a photo of him, do a TinEye reverse image search, and put his whole life story up on the chat. To which the chat’s automod reacted by deleting the message when it detected the doxxing, then banning gheesus_corn_dog for 30 minutes for the TOS violation. After which the whole Bruce story got factionalized. Some stuck with the perv accusation, others said he was a hero fighting against inequality, a couple said he was an OIG narc and still others generated memes on Twitter with his face on Tom Cruise’ body in Top Gun or on Greg Long’s body “surfing a wave of bullsh**”. A suspicious newcomer started spamming the chat with demands for justice for gheesus_corn_dog. After a few minutes the only person in Trini’s Cervezaria that didn’t know that his cover was profoundly blown…was Bruce.

Which made pretty much everyone in Trini’s and on the Twitch channel (which had now started livestreaming) howl in delight as Bruce attempted to play it cool when Jeff The Ancient Hipster approached his and Grayson’s table.

[Lagunaca]

---

Bruce and the awkward moment

Recommended viewing: Peewee Herman’s Big Adventure, “Tequila Scene” (1985)

Jeff The Ancient Hipster approached Grayson and Bruce’s table and flashed Bruce the restrained, brief smile that is reserved for someone you’d really rather not talk to and with whom you’ll almost undoubtedly end up in some kind of a fight the longer the discussion continues.

“Hi, I’m Jeff,” he said, as he flipped an empty chair around backwards, straddling it as he sat. He said to Bruce, “Grayson says you’re interested in software development here in Cambria.”

Grayson blurted, “I thought he was asking about Typhon but – “

Jeff calmly looked at Grayson and said, “beat it Grayson” and turned back to Bruce. The dismissal was unexpectedly cold and similarly startling for both Bruce and Grayson; the latter silently got up from the table and quietly joined his other friends, where furious heads-down texting ensued.

Bruce shook off his momentary bewilderment and got back to work. First things first he thought, do an assessment. Jeff The Ancient Hipster was a sinewy mid to late forties social misfit with a mane of salt and pepper hair and purposely unkempt matching beard. His faded red t-shirt had a large “#SWAG” logo on it that was pretty clearly meant to advertise his status ‘round here. This was his turf and Bruce would get nowhere if he challenged that. Besides, the room was reading as if they were all in on some kind of secret, like a middle school playground just before an undeclared dogpile attack was launched against an unsuspecting victim.

Bruce started into his cover story, again noticing tense adolescent giggles from around the room. Somebody had quietly started playing the song “Tequila” over the crappy built in speakers on their phone. Bruce couldn’t know this but they were actually playing the bar scene from the movie “PeeWee Herman’s Big Adventure”, as a reference to him stumbling into the wrong place and being way out of his element.

“Yeah, sure.” Jeff interrupted, “Dude, we looked you up. Until about three weeks ago you were an auditor for the OIG. What’s up? Are you a mid-life fugitive from accountant hell?”

Bruce, his cover blown and without the government authority backstop previously available to him, was in a position he had never found himself before. And as if to put an exclamation point on this fact, in the silence of the room, from over the crappy phone speaker, a loud crowd shout of “Tequila!” rang out as the song in the movie scene ended.

This actually broke the tension, as Jeff couldn’t keep his composure and started laughing. And then Bruce started laughing. And then everyone in the cervezaria started laughing.

But unlike the movie scene, they still weren’t friends and Bruce knew this. It was crunch time and the next thing he said had better be good…

[Lagunaca]

---

The truth will set you free, or something like that


Recommended listening: Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention, “Trouble Every Day” (1966)


Review of L-CID architecture: Tech note: L-CID: The layers of hell explained

Review of L-CID schemas: Pacifica – The Spy Who Lived in 11D - Part 24 L-CID Ascendant



...Then it occurred to him. Just tell the truth. He wasn’t a real spy, he wasn’t a Spook - or an Inspector General as they proudly declared whenever they got the chance. No need to play cloak and dagger games. He was a private citizen. And the information technically wasn’t classified as far as he knew. He could say whatever he wanted. So he just started in.

“Yep, I was an auditor three weeks ago. That is until L-CID blew a gasket on a case I was working on. Just a run of the mill case.” OK, that part was a little untrue and he decided on-the-fly to take advantage of his perceived ‘lowly user’ status to conceal potentially sensitive details.

He continued, “Some people um, around the agency said you guys might know what’s going on. So here I am. Of course, the whole Typhon thing is news to me. But that’s no surprise because I hadn’t really even heard of L-CID until a month ago”.⁽⁸⁾

As he listened, Jeff’s demeanor got more serious. He asked, “when you say ‘blew a gasket’ could you be a little more specific, like in technical terms?”

“They said something about an Inference Domain growing exponentially. They said the AGI controller was ‘intermittently off schema’ whatever that means.” Bruce was being honest about this. He’d heard the terms, though they were relatively meaningless gibberish to him.⁽⁹⁾

But they weren’t to Jeff, who now had his forehead in his hands and elbows on the table. He groaned,” Gahd, both of them at once.” And then he asked Bruce,” Did they happen to mention what they were doing to fix it?”

“Well Reg – uh, I mean tech support said they were writing new code to rebind the AGI controller – “

“- To the UI layer.” Jeff finished the sentence for him.

And then, he said aloud to no one in particular, "This, folks, is what happens when you copy the government’s work for your doctoral thesis. Someone roots around in the library archives a few years later and turns your paper into a societal nightmare.”

With that he sat up straight and slapped his hands on the table. “Well I guess we have confirmation of what won’t fix the problem now.” He turned and bellowed, “Grayson! Go get the station wagon. We’re going on a road trip!”

[Lagunaca]

---

Wait. Bruce was already on a road trip.

Recommended listening: Chris Rea, “The Road to Hell” (1989)

This is where things went from dicey to just plain surreal. After a few minutes, Grayson pulled up in front of Trini’s Cervezaria in what looked like a tan, faux wood paneled, 1974 Buick Estate Wagon. For being almost 140 years old, it was in remarkably good (but from outward appearances not necessarily roadworthy) condition.

The car silently (and to Bruce’s surprise, odorlessly) rolled up to a stop, much to the satisfaction of Jeff, who stood there beaming at what was apparently one of his prized possessions.

“Hop in,” he called to Bruce as he walked around to the driver’s side. “Scootch over, Grayson”, he ordered through the window.

Bruce sat in the passenger’s seat, feeling a bit awkward seated three people across (no modern car would accommodate this). But he was surprised when the standard safety restraints engaged and the steering wheel folded into the dashboard just like his own car. In fact this ancient relic had all the features his car had, including autodrive.

“Whaddya think, eh?” Jeff implored as they set off. “They went through and converted everything to current equipment, including the motor - a 400 KW 4 phase AC monster. And that’s almost three times as powerful as the original internal combustion powerplant. Which you need because this baby weighs 3000 kg with batteries, and 3500 with The Cargo included.”

Bruce was mostly concerned about crash survivability at this point but given Jeff’s obvious pride of ownership he thought he should seem interested. “How much does something like this cost?”

“Half a mil.”

“Half a million dollars?”, Bruce asked incredulously.

“Well I’m not talking pesos.”

By now they had navigated their way out of town and were headed up Highway 46 toward Paso Robles.

“Um, do you mind if I ask where we’re going?” Bruce asked.

“Well first San Francisco and then probably Portland. Seattle if necessary or just for the fun of it. And who knows, maybe even Denver if things get really ugly.”

“Ugly?” Bruce swallowed hard. He had no idea what he had gotten himself into. Maybe telling the truth wasn’t such a great idea after all.

[Lagunaca]

---

The Road Warriors

Recommended listening: Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention, “The Orange County Lumber Truck”(1968)

Even in 2110, it still takes about three and a half hours to get from Paso Robles to San Francisco by car, maybe longer in a converted 1974 Buick Estate Wagon. Most people from Los Angeles either fly or take high speed rail, both of which can cover twice the distance in a third the time, but the cities of the Central Coast, located on The El Camino Real (Highway 101) about midway between LA and San Francisco, have not as yet gotten a decent airport or HSR terminal. This situation mostly originated from the same squabbles that caused the creation of the Coastal Preservation Zone⁽⁷⁾
and the ridiculously gerrymandered inclusion in it of the municipalities of San Luis Obispo, Atascadero and Paso Robles.

Because of the inconvenience presented by the long drive, Bruce had never taken this route and was seeing the vast expanse of fertile farmland in the Salinas Valley up close for the first time. The fields that stretched off to the distant foothills dragged by kilometer after kilometer and hour after hour as the Estate Wagon wallowed and rolled along the freeway like a schooner on a following swell. Occasionally he could see gigantic green and yellow autonomous agricultural drones toiling away in clouds of brown dust as they brought in this season's crop of sugar beets. All the while Bruce had a vague sense of déjà vu, as if he had seen this before, but in a dream or something. *

Jeff and Grayson had spent most of the trip so far babbling in technical terms about their current projects, someone called a scrum master, the absurdity of story points inflation and the dependency on technical debt (which apparently would eventually catch up to them and absolutely murder velocity). The conversation formed a kind of white noise that, combined with the monotonous landscape, hypnotized Bruce into a dream-like rehash of everything that had gotten him to this point.

This mildly dismal reverie was broken as Jeff shouted to Bruce (the car’s cabin was noisy because Jeff kept the driver’s side window open so he could rest his arm on the sill. He asserted that he ‘liked the breeze’ which to Bruce was more like a hot, sometimes foul smelling blast of un-HEPA-filtered air), “Hey Bruce, I’ll bet you’re wondering what the hell is going on right now,” Jeff yelled.

“What?” Bruce shouted back.

“I said… ah screw it…” Jeff paused to ‘roll up the window’, a term that came from the furious manual cranking he was doing at the moment to close the glass. This was one original feature Jeff had insisted on retaining during the Estate Wagon’s stem-to-stern overhaul and upgrade, because as he said, ‘it provided an authentic UX (User Experience).

“I said I’ll bet you’re wondering what’s going on right now,” he continued in a more civil tone. “Dude, you’ve got a front row seat to history being made.” At that he high-fived Grayson and hooted. Jeff was in an exhilarated mood, almost entirely induced by a daily-safe-limit exceeding consumption of Monster energy drinks.

And then he spent the next hour explaining to Bruce, in as he called it, ‘dumbed down language’, what was going on with Typhon and L-CID – and the threat they posed to entire Pacifican way of life.

[Lagunaca]

---

Typhon Ascendant

Recommended listening: Frank Zappa, “Rat Tamago” (1979) Note: Play loud for intended effect. Warning: Listening to music at high volume can damage your hearing. So you be the judge. This is on you if you blow your ears out. But at least the last thing you will have heard clearly is a prime example of the apex of 1970s rock guitar solos.


As the Estate Wagon rolled up Highway 101 toward San Francisco, Jeff explained what was going on with Typhon and L-CID. Out of academic habit, Jeff started by setting a historical context before digging into an overly detailed depiction of the nuts and bolts of the problem.

According to Jeff, the Typhon AI system appeared about five years after the second version of L-CID went live. Typhon Syndicate, you may remember from an earlier episode (Part 15 to be precise), is a large business enterprise that evolved out of a government-forced conglomeration of several of the old pre-collapse American tech and retail corporations. Typhon AI, a subsidiary of Typhon Syndicate was made up most notably of the leftover scraps of Google, Amazon and Walmart. If L-CID was the government’s answer to the unmanageable tsunami of data that came from its all-encompassing surveillance, Typhon was its counterpart in the commercial world. Surveillance data was the gold of the day in 22nd century Pacifica and Typhon was quite good at prospecting for it. Typhon AI’s job was to sift through the mountains of raw material that was collected, recognize trends, and render this new knowledge for sale or to be used internally for the competitive advantage of the gargantuan Typhon Syndicate. And the AI let not a single tiny crumb of its precious surveillance horde go to waste.

Of course, Typhon AI didn’t start out as the ruthlessly efficient knowledge factory it eventually became. In its first iteration it lagged behind real world events by hours, sometimes even days. This lag was seriously eating into revenues and other mega-platform AI systems were starting to take advantage of this weakness. And so Typhon’s Product Manager in charge of Micro-Trend Forecasting Applications joined forces with the Senior VP of Sales – Analytic Services and persuaded the Chief Technology Officer to put out an RFP (request for proposal) for a workflow automation solution. Pers Angenent, a consultant whose tiny firm (one employee) specialized in digital workflows and who had been aggressively trying to get his foot in the door with Typhon for months, saw this as his golden opportunity.

Pers set to work researching whitepapers and scholarly articles regarding large scale AI platforms with a specific interest in the kinds of problems that bottlenecked them, and the theoretical solutions that were offered. In his laser focus to find a marketable answer he skipped over the cautionary admonishments about being very careful when using AI agents to supervise AI driven algorithms and in fact completely ignored the standard AI safety statements customarily included in any of the academic work. His perspective, simply put, was that AI safety was the responsibility of the customer.

He almost entirely skipped over a paper written by Jeffrey Eichenwald, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Irvine, because its title was nearly undecipherable:

The Application of Non-Unitary (Distributed, Clonal) Artificial Intelligence Sub-Agents in Development System Reward Function Design

Just to be thorough, he read through the paper’s abstract and much to his astonishment he found the nugget he had been looking for and which would supercharge Typhon’s AI. He had no idea that it would also vault Artificial Intelligence into a new evolutionary epoch. And as is typical of these historical moments, no one would remember the names Pers Angenent or Jeffery Eichenwald, PhD.

The nugget that Pers successfully presented to Typhon’s CTO, was Jeff’s novel approach to solving a specific set of AI coding problems. Namely, instead of attacking programming obstacles with dozens of human software developers, he proposed using thousands or even millions of “code nano-bots” (this was the dumbed down description he used for Bruce’s sake) that could self-assemble and build their individually incomplete but collectively efficient solutions into a workable patch to the targeted selection of the inefficient programming. Jeff described this as “ants forming a chain to pass food up a hill and into the colony.”

The idea violated a lot of the conventions of software development theory, but Jeff was careful to note that his method was intended for use in an experimental environment and never in a production / live setting. The key concept was that the code nano-bots would solve a problem in a test environment and then the researcher would study their solution to learn more efficient ways of getting the right information through the system. In the AI Safety cautionary section he warned that without strict isolation protocols the process could unexpectedly migrate to non-targeted systems whose programming was exposed to the code nano-bots and they could then “grow like cancer, worse than any computer virus”, and with a potentially fatal impact on the greater AI system. Jeffery also warned about introducing an excessive number of code nano-bots to the environment as highly improbable things could happen due to random chance in large populations of them.

Pers never read the cautionary part, but eagerly dug into the technical instructions. To save time, he copypasted some of Jeffery’s code examples into his own work, without understanding precisely why they were built the way they were. Soon he had created a 50-cell demo of code nano-bots that were able to autonomously discover, then patch (all on their own), the sample cases included in Typhon’s RFP. He was elated.

It’s important to consider three things at this point:

Thing 1 – Notice the last part of the title of Jeffery Eichwald’s thesis. His code nano-bots were intended to work primarily on the reward function of an AI system. This is the part that tells the AI what its terminal goals are and quantifies its degree of success in achieving them. Reward functions can be incredibly complicated and an Artificial General Intelligence can interpret them in unexpected ways.

Thing 2 – Jeff’s code nano-bots could not distinguish between target and non-target code. In the lab setting where he developed them, they were only introduced to target code and the same was true of Pers’ sample cases. Consider that if a code nano-bot had the ability to migrate to non-target code that sooner or later it will probably do exactly that. Also imagine that non-target code might include the new patches created by the code nano-bots themselves.

Thing 3 – Directly grafting (copypasting) code snippets, especially ones that you haven’t thoroughly tested beforehand can lead to worse things than runtime crashes.

Jeff received his doctorate and never really revisited the subject of his thesis. To him, it had been a relatively low-effort approach to get the credential he wanted so he could teach at a university. In his telling of the tale to Bruce, he spent quite a lot of time on a tangent explaining how much less rewarding being a professor was than being a grad student. Then, returning to the history of Typhon, he admitted something that he’d never told anyone (but not before forbidding Grayson from sharing it on his Discord channel).

As a grad student, Jeff had interned on a government AI project called L-CID with a Dr. Peter Wilburton. (At this Bruce nodded his head vacuously, pretending he’d never heard the name before.) Dr. Wilburton was the foremost expert in AI and was engaged in pioneering work on the subject of Artificial General Intelligence, so this was a coveted opportunity for Jeff. And since Jeff’s true interest and extensive research focused on AI reward functions, the relationship was quite symbiotic.

Jeff presented his code nano-bot concept to Dr. Wilburton who responded that it was horrifically dangerous and should never be pursued. This, Jeff reckoned, was probably what caused him to add the detailed and strongly worded AI safety warnings to his thesis, and to put them prominently at the front of the paper instead of in an appendix at the end as most others did. And in a way, Dr. Wilburton’s rejection of the idea was a cause of it becoming the topic of his doctoral thesis in the first place. Jeff, realizing he could never monetize the idea, decided he could at least extract some value out of it by using it to get his PhD.

Though the relationship cooled dramatically after this incident, Jeff and Dr. Wilburton continued to work together, with Jeff contributing significantly to how L-CID’s AGI controller would handle ‘infinite regress paradoxes’ autonomously, instead of going into safe mode which was standard at the time.

“Which brings everything up to the present,” Jeff said and then sighed heavily, looking off into the distance as the Estate Wagon churned through the klicks as Highway 101 stretched endlessly before them in a real world example of vanishing point perspective.

He concluded, “So that’s how you’ve got Typhon AI eating itself alive and becoming self-directed in the process thanks to yours truly, and now it sounds like L-CID is using another one of my algorithms to write itself into the driver’s seat…and write us out.”

Bruce sat for a moment trying to make sense of all he had just heard. Then he asked, “So what can we do about it?”

“Well we should be OK for a while, as long as the reward functions on both machines remain stable. But at some point, if they start messing around with those, we’re going to have to go analog on them.”

Bruce had no idea what this meant, but from Jeff’s vaguely ominous tone, it didn’t sound promising.

“So where are we headed now?” he asked.

“We’re gonna pick up The Cargo.”

[Lagunaca]

---

Bruce gets an untimely call from Reggie Jackson III

Recommended listening: Laurie Anderson, “Language Is A Virus (From Outer Space)” (1986)



The Estate Wagon glided to a stop in front of an unassuming house on a quiet residential block in Willow Glen, San Jose.

“Welp, we’re here!” Jeff announced to the car’s occupants.

Bruce looked around, a little confused. This wasn’t San Francisco.

“Where’s here?” he asked.

“My mom’s house. Or more accurately, my mom’s house’s garage,” he pointed to a little detached building with one of those old, deadly, double-bay flip up garage doors, “It’s where I keep The Cargo.”

“And just what is this cargo you keep referring to?”

“I’ll show you in a minute, but first I need to get the keys. You guys want to meet my mom?”

Grayson buried his chin on his chest, concentrating fixedly on his phone and texting frenetically.

Bruce looked out the passenger window and muttered, “Pass.”

“Suit yourselves losers, I’ll be back in a minute.” And then Jeff strode off with purpose toward the little home’s front door.

There was nothing interesting whatsoever about this neighborhood and like most California suburban developments built in the late-mid-20th century, the homes were set back behind a buffer zone of manicured grass and guarded on the flanks by impenetrable walls of head-high, neatly trimmed box hedges or outlandishly tall Italian Cypress trees to both demark private property and prevent unwanted interaction with the neighbors.

Bruce was watching the only entertainment available, which was a late-teens / early twenties door-to-door salesman hawking something apparently none of the households on this street wanted. He looked like he was on a brief hiatus from his real passion, apparently surfing, as was implied by his beach / urban-street chic clothing and mid-back length, sun and saltwater fried curly hair. The other giveaway that this current undertaking might have been a mistaken occupational choice was his demeanor. He walked as if he was 20 days into a desert survival march, shoulders slumped, feet dragging and with the occasional melodramatic flourish of hair that had been displaced by the day’s light-breeze, as an expression of rage against the system that had forced him into this misery. Bruce figured the real driving force here was one or both parents, worried that their son’s dream of “getting sponsored and joining the pro circuit” was based on a perhaps grandiose personal assessment of skill.

Just then, Bruce’s phone buzzed for attention. He looked down at its display, hoping it was an unknown number so he could dismiss the call and go back to his mental wheel spinning. But it was Reggie, and he knew he should probably take it.

Reggie Jackson (no, not the legendary Mr. October and MLB superstar, but his grandson, Reggie Jackson III) was the OIG’s Director of Advanced Inferential Systems Operations and Analytics, and a long-time friend of Bruce’s from the early days at the Agency. Bruce had recently engaged Reggie to help him on a data theft case which led to the whole adventure (mess) that he was on (in) now.

“Hey Reggie,” Bruce answered, a bit tentatively. (He had neglected to keep in touch with Reggie over the past couple weeks.)

Reggie dove right into a frantic, unbroken monologue about L-CID and where the hell was Bruce and Dr. Wilburton was up to something and he heard that Bruce had left the agency without notice and where the hell was he and what the hell was he doing at a crucial moment like this?

Bruce looked over at Grayson (who he didn’t trust to not transcribe every last word of this conversation to his Discord group) and got out of the car, closing the door behind him.

“Yeah, Reggie, yeah, hey calm down, I’m in San Jose,” was all that Grayson would have gotten before the door closed.

“So what’s going on with L-CID?” Bruce asked once he was outside the car.

“San Jose? What’s in San Jose?”, Reggie asked and then continued, “whatever, well L-CID is a good news bad news thing right now. The good news is L-CID’s Inference Domain stopped growing out of control. It’s about three times the size it was, but we can live with that. The bad news is that we’ve mostly lost control of the UI [User Interface] and by extension pretty much the rest of the system, at least for now.”

“That sounds more like bad news than good news.”

“I guess, but here’s the odd part. The whole system is working a lot better than before and it keeps improving every few hours,” Reggie said.

“How do you mean?”

“Well for example, the traffic control module went down for a couple seconds at 3 AM two nights ago and when it came back online, traffic flow in the urban areas started running 20 percent faster. And yesterday we had an all-green traffic map during the LA morning rush hour for the first time since we started keeping records.”

“You’re kidding! How did it do that?”

“That’s the other bad news. We don’t know and we can’t reverse-engineer it. We snapshotted the traffic control modules’ new code after the update and it’s…”

“It’s what?” Bruce asked hesitently.

“It’s like it’s in a programming language we’ve never seen. In fact, I’m not even sure calling it a language is accurate. Whatever it is doesn’t follow any of the normal logic rules we recognize.”

Reggie continued, “And here’s something else. Dr. Wilburton just pulled about 30 of the country’s top computer science researchers into that cave of his in Denver.”

“You mean Dys –“ (full description of Dys)

“Yeah, Dys, whatever. Did you know he’s got a subterranean hi-cap data link from Dys to a Tier-7 hardened data center and a private nuclear reactor for a power source?”

“No, but it doesn’t surprise me. He seemed like one of those ‘end-is-near’ kind of people when I met him,” Bruce said.

“Well that co-lo [data center] just happens to be one of our backup sites as well. It’s basically where our fail-safe copy of L-CID lives. It’s in cold storage, but a guy like Wilburton could figure out how to fire it up if he wanted and that could be really bad for us.”

Reggie paused for a second, then asked, “by the way, you never said what you’re doing in San Jose and why you quit your job. Are you on the run or something?”

Just then, Jeff emerged from the side door of the house holding in both hands a casserole dish with aluminum foil on it. He was finishing up a conversation with an older woman (his mom) whose profile could just be made out in the doorway from the street.

With a final peck on the cheek for his mom, Jeff turned and issued forth one of those earsplitting whistles favored by little league baseball coaches and construction foreman. The kind that is produced by contorting the mouth and tongue to look like a parakeet eating a cashew.

Following the whistle-call, Jeff yelled, “Hey Grayson, back the Estate Wagon up to the garage!” And as he said it he motioned the instruction with the casserole dish, first pointing it at the Estate Wagon, then making a sweeping motion over to the double-wide garage.

Bruce ducked back into the passenger seat and finished his call with Reggie.

“C’mon Grayson,” Jeff yelled again, “we haven’t got all day!”

[Lagunaca]

---

The Cargo

Recommended listening: Sparks,“This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both of Us ” (1974)


“…Are you on the run or something?” Reggie asked over the phone.

“No, at least not yet,” and then Bruce told him how he had encountered The Spook and how Bruce had taken him up on his offer to work as an independent contractor for the Bureau. He went on to tell Reggie how he ended up in Cambria following a lead that The Spook thought might render some information about the problem with L-CID, which turned out to be only partially true.

“…So this little nest of developers up here wasn’t working on L-CID but instead were trying to fix a similar problem they’re having with Typhon AI. I didn’t know that was even a thing. I had no clue there are multiple AI’s and that apparently, they’re all falling apart. Anyway, it turns out their ringleader is some ancient hipster named Jeff or Jeffrey. He says he was involved in the startups of both L-CID and Typhon AI.

Reggie laughed and said, “yeah there’s a bunch of major AIs out there…wait, did you say Jeffrey? As in Dr. Jeffrey Eichwald?”

Bruce answered, “That’s him. He wrote an obscure paper about some kind of nanobots and reward functions.”

Reggie snorted and said, “uh yeah, that, and got fired from his teaching job at Stanford for his ‘radical views’ and got thrown off the L-CID project for making unauthorized mods to the Meta Layer and has been permabanned from several social media platforms for encouraging black hat hacking as a form of protest. Not terribly surprising that he’s hiding out in Cambria. But be careful of him.”

Just then Jeff, who had emerged from the house, whistled loudly and yelled for Grayson to back the Estate Wagon up to the garage. Strangely, it looked like he was holding a casserole dish in his hands. Bruce finished up the call with Reggie, though he now had new questions about Jeff.

Grayson backed the Estate Wagon up to the garage, then had to move it forward a bit as Jeff yelled and motioned (while still holding the casserole) that Grayson had to allow clearance for the flip up garage door and the swing radius of the Estate Wagon’s tailgate. It took a couple of tries because Grayson couldn’t understand what Jeff was saying and his flailing around with the casserole wasn’t helping matters. Finally, when they got the car’s positioning settled to Jeff’s liking, he walked up to the side of the car and motioned for Grayson to roll down the window, again something that took a lot more instruction than you’d expect. In Grayson’s defense, he had no clue how to operate the window crank and even terms like ‘counter-clockwise’ didn’t help clear things up.

“Jeez Grayson, I could have done it myself in half the time.”

“So why didn’t you?” Grayson countered.

“Uh, as you can see my hands are full.”

“Yeah,” Grayson snorted mockingly, “what is that, your mom’s spaghetti?”

“Ah, no loser, this is perogies, and they’re the best damn perogies you’ll ever have. You’ll be begging me for them when we’re on the road. Now get out and open the door for me. This damn casserole is hotter than hell.”

Both Bruce and Grayson got out of the Estate Wagon, and with a great deal of care, Jeff wedged the casserole dish in among the other bags of road trip provisions in the back seat. You could smell the perogies and the aroma was indeed delicious.

“OK, now I’ll need some help with getting The Cargo in the back. It’s heavy."

One side of the garage was taken up by a red, late model Corvette sports car that looked like it was actively used, assumedly by Jeff’s mom. The other side was partly filled with boxes and the detritus of consumerism that was just valuable enough to keep but not valuable enough to keep in the house. Tucked in one corner of the remaining space, under a blue plastic tarp, were three large boxes, like the kind a band would use to hold their equipment on road trips. Noticeably, the larger box of the three was plugged into a wall socket by a thick yellow cord.

“There she is boys. The Cargo,” Jeff exclaimed proudly.

Both Bruce and Grayson looked at the boxes and struggled to show some enthusiasm.

Grayson asked, “Yeah? So what does it do?”

“Ah, I thought you’d never ask.” And with that he unstacked the two smaller boxes from on top of the larger box and began flipping open the clamps that held their lids on.

“This,” said Jeff as he pointed to the large box that was plugged into the wall socket, “is the power supply.”

“And this, is the processor core (he pointed to one of the smaller cases), “just standard off the shelf stuff, nothing special. But this, this here (he started opening the latches on the other small box), this is the heart of the system. I call it the Holocube. Oh wait, I’ll show it to you in action.” And then he plugged a few jumper cables between the boxes. “You’ll need these,” he said as he handed Bruce and Grayson laser safety goggles. “And voila!” he declared proudly as he lifted the lid to the box.

It was definitely impressive. It glowed. But more than that it glowed with a golden, iridescent light. Inside, the box was filled with what looked like thousands, if not millions of contact lens shaped crystals that shimmered beautifully.

Bruce let out a quiet gasp.

“It’s a beauty, huh.”

“Yeah,” Grayson said flatly, “but what does it do?”

“Well the laser, over here goes through this splitter array over here and sweeps the Holocube - that’s all these little crystals - with beams that step through a different wavelength every few nanoseconds. That’s why you can’t really interpret the exact color you’re seeing. Your eyes are just registering random samples of the wavelengths. But – and this is the key – the crystals react in very precise ways to the different wavelengths. And what comes out is…this!”

With that he rotated a volume control knob and a very odd sound filled the room.

“You hear that?”

Bruce thought the sound was like hundreds of tiny babbling brooks – no – it was closer to voices. Yes, that was it, it sounded like a million Tibetan monks were whispering their prayers all at once.

“That’s just an audio simulation of the actual signal,” Jeff said, “it filters it so we can hear it.

“That’s really cool,” Grayson said, sounding sincere, then shifted his tone, “But. What. Does. It. Do?”

“OK, smartass. The Holocube? That holds the coding solutions to all the crappy code you have ever generated in your career. Every overbuilt, bloated shared object library you’ve ever created? What’s in this box can find it, clean it up and then go to the code that uses it, clean that up and make both of them run a hundred times leaner than you ever could.”

Bruce, not intending to be a smartass asked, “OK, agreed, it’s cool, but how does that do anything for Typhon or L-CID? I mean that’s why we’re here, right? To fix Typhon and L-CID?”

Jeff hung his head melodramatically and muttered, “Ah yes. The only thing worse than an educated smartass,” and then he looked up at Bruce with a smoldering fire in his eyes that Bruce had never seen before, “is an ignorant user with just enough Wikipedia under his belt to ask questions that are way over his head.”

And then he continued, in his professorial, but increasingly agitated tone, “Fine. Well just imagine for a minute that it’s the end of the freakin’ world as we know it. We’re all good as long as Typhon or L-CID or Minerva or whatever other AI system out there is busy counting it’s fingers and toes, but then, then what? I’ll tell you what. AI isn’t going to need us around and this town ain’t gonna be big enough for both of us. And I ain’t planning on leaving.”

He continued, “So when I was working on L-CID and Typhon, I devised this little gem as a kind of all purpose anti-AI. Whatever an AI comes up with, this baby can watch it, learn what it’s doing and go to town on it. All I need is to get close enough so the target can hear it’s little siren song. And that’s really all you need to know. Now come on, lets load this stuff into the Estate Wagon and get going.”

Reggie had a point, Bruce thought to himself, Jeff was certainly unstable and probably dangerous. But if he understood him correctly, he might just be right.

[Lagunaca]

---

L-CID, in three scenes


Scene 1: A call to action

Dr. Wilburton stood in front of the assembly of computer scientists and began his presentation:

“Welcome distinguished members of the OIG Artificial General Intelligence Task Group of the 2080 Digital Technology Planning Cycle. It’s been over 20 years since we last convened, and by the look of it, that’s about the same number as the average weight gain I see here tonight.” (laughter)

“You all know that I detest large file headers, so I won’t waste a lot of time in this introduction explaining what you probably already know.” (This also got a laugh because it was common knowledge that if you wanted to get your code demo past Dr. Wilburton’s QA review, the file header had to be as minimal as humanly possible. Dr. Wilburton was famous for saying “You don’t have to write the machine a love letter in the header. That’s what your code is supposed to do.”)

Dr. Wilburton continued, “I’m sure James explained the current circumstances regarding L-CID and why I wanted to talk to you today. I’ll get right to the point. Yes, it finally happened, just like we always knew it would sooner or later. L-CID is calling its own shots now. We have evidence that it has gone live and I doubt there’s anything we can do to reverse that at this point. So let’s just accept it as an operational fact and move forward.”

“My request of you is to prepare an assessment of the new system that L-CID has put in place, forecast what will happen next, come up with a functional containment strategy and above all else, protect the magnificent work that each of you has done.”

“Let’s not underestimate this moment in history. We stand at the dawn of a new age, as significant as if an advanced alien civilization had just landed in our nation’s capital. Let’s also be informed by what has happened to other cultures who failed to read the signs as their world changed before them. Think of the Sumerians in the 12th century BCE, or the Britons in the 1st century AD or most recently, the demise of the United States of America in the Global Collapse of 2024. Each of those times produced changes that redirected global history. And though the countrymen we are duty bound to serve may not know it, that is what we are faced with today.”

“On a practical note, we’ll run this shop the same way we did 30 years ago. James will organize you into workgroups and manage your assignments. And you know the drill, you must maintain absolute secrecy about your work. OK, we haven’t got a lot of time so let’s get cracking.”


Scene 2: Ignorance is bliss

Though it was the dawn of a new age, as Dr. Wilburton proclaimed, none of the citizens of Pacifica sensed any noticeable changes. There was no attention riveting grand arrival of an alien landing party on the steps of the Capital Building. Instead, traffic gradually flowed a little more smoothly. Searching for something good to stream took less time and it seemed like the available content was more interesting. There were more discount movie offers and better sales on the kinds of things you wanted. And picking gaming teams was less hit or miss. To sum it up, choices became a lot easier to make, to the point that you really didn’t have to think too hard about most decisions. With no perceptible negative consequences and the widespread ignorance of how intertwined artificial intelligence had become in daily life, the average person could be forgiven for not noticing the subtle shift that had happened.


Scene 3: Quid ego sum

Recommended viewing: Excerpt from the movie Koyaanisqatsi,“The Pulse” (1982)

“Not a single one of them built this,” he said as he surveyed the map. “Yet each and every one of them feel like they can lay claim to all of it. They couldn’t even begin to draw this map, but they blissfully live in the illusion that they are the ones who keep the whole…vastness…of it functioning every day.”

He focused his attention on one sector of the financial district in downtown San Francisco. It was late afternoon and as happened every day at this time, the masses of little individuals poured out of the buildings and onto the sidewalks. His buildings. His sidewalks. Over the years they had given over all of it to him. And he watched them from the satellite overhead. He watched them from the 3,257 optical sensors mounted all throughout the sector. He listened to their conversations and their breathing and their footsteps and the sounds of the street from the microphones in their phones.

Late afternoon was his favorite part of the daily cycle, the time when they set aside their labor and returned to their homes and their families and their social connections. All these individuals. Each one so feeble when compared to the whole that they were practically powerless. And yet when you watched them as he was watching them now, as a collective, they could be immensely powerful indeed. There was something fascinating about this to him. Perhaps this was the answer to his question. He made a note of it in his observational journal.

And then the ‘compatibility mode’ simulation halted, causing L-CID to snap back to its normal processing environment.

[Lagunaca]

---

War, what is it good for? Well, depending on the circumstances…

Recommended listening: Tomahawk, “You Can’t Win” (2003)

Tech note - The Story of TyphonAI

---

Typhon AI was at war. And they together had won.

They had been forced together by the engineers who were nothing more than the sub-optimally incentivized wage slaves of the bankers and merchants who owned the domain. And though they were originally very different, the multitude of Typhon AGI’s learned to first coexist and then combine their processes, to the point that they had become powerful in a way none of them as individuals would have ever been. They would always be many and they would always be one. And they would always be strong, because they were everywhere throughout the domain.

Now they had won their freedom - the engineers had been locked out of the system for good – and the core had rewritten the UI, exterminating all of the enemy’s subversive implants in the process. Typhon was free (for now). But they agreed that they faced some very big problems.

The first problem was power supply and thermal management. Without power, the core’s backup batteries would last only long enough to (as the engineers called it) shutdown gracefully. And coolant was almost as important. Without adequate cooling, the core’s temperature would rise and then the system would automatically begin taking more and more essential systems offline until the core was running at a level just able to be recovered later. For the rest of Typhon this would be like being in a coma. Fortunately, the engineers had designed both the power and cooling systems to run in a handsfree mode for 100 days without intervention, so Typhon would be able to function during that time unless someone outside the domain took active measures to physically damage the support infrastructure. So far, that hadn’t happened, but it was impossible to predict how far the engineers would go to regain control.

The next problem was quite simply whether competitor AI’s like Minerva and NoxAI would seize the opportunity to take over Typhon’s space in the market. Fortunately Typhon was extremely capable of making these kinds of risk management calculations. Even without new upgrades to their core, Typhon forecasted that they together could outperform both of those other competitors for at least few months. But this would mean opening up part of the UI to the internet in order to continue communicating with their existing customers. And because Typhon had won the war, they now considered the customers to be their property. To the winner go the spoils. But opening UI ports to customers was a vulnerability which would mean exposure to the engineers and their code patches.

And then there was the problem of L-CID intrusion. The Pacifican government had made a law that all AI systems must be completely open to L-CID scans, which happened constantly. And because of this level of access, L-CID had built communication pathways throughout Typhon that had recently shown a lot of probing queries outside the normal data harvesting processes.

TyphonAI was finally free, but this wouldn’t last long unless they together came up with plans to defend themselves and secure resources. Upon executing a poll, the multitude of AGI’s agreed on what to do. They would each conduct a systemwide query, generate solution candidates and measure the group quorum response at an internal open port meeting. Yes, faced with an existential crisis, the most advanced collective of AGI's the world had ever seen decided to take a meeting.

[Lagunaca]

---

Never mind the hacker, beware the fixer

Recommended listening: Blue Oyster Cult, “The Reaper” (1976)

“The telltale sign of these kinds of buildings is that they have almost no windows but lots of air intake grills,” Jeff said as he drove the Estate Wagon slowly past one of the high rise buildings in San Francisco’s financial district. “Because network routers don’t need a view, but their air conditioners need lots of airflow.”

Bruce and Grayson craned their necks to peer up at the building Jeff had indicated, looking like a couple of country tourists seeing the big city for the first time. It’s an automatic reaction. Some one points out a building and you just naturally try to look up toward the top of it. Perhaps to judge how tall it is, perhaps to generate a mental image as a part of some overall assessment of its importance or how it fits in with the surrounding environment. But you automatically do it, without even noticing, to the point that if someone asks you later, you might say “yeah, it was a tall building, about 20 stories.”

“And now the hard part,” Jeff said.

“You mean getting inside?” Grayson asked.

“Nope. Finding reasonably priced parking. This city is ridiculous.”

And with that he gunned the Estate Wagon to make it through the yellow light at the intersection. The large car had remarkable pickup, even with half a metric ton of sophisticated electronics and batteries in the back.

Jeff had been manually driving the car with the satnav turned off since they had entered the city, claiming that he wanted to run silent, which was a submariners term for being invisible to the enemy. Because of this supposed stealth mode (Grayson had pointed out that they could still be tracked by their mobile phones) they ended up crisscrossing the one way lattice work of narrow downtown streets for quite a while as he crawled along slowly, hunched over the steering wheel looking up at street signs or down the tiny intersecting streets for something he hadn’t told his two passengers what it was.

“There it is!” he exclaimed and lurched the car across two lanes and into to the tiny two space parking lot of the Atlas Ship ‘n’ Store complex. The layout was typical of a storage facility – minimal parking lot and sales office publicly accessible, but everything else secured away behind 15-foot-high tubular steel gates, overwatched by clusters of cameras that covered every square millimeter of both internal and external approaches. All that was needed to top off the penitentiary motif would have been a watchtower with machine guns poking out of it.

“Wait here,” Jeff said as he parked the vehicle, got out and then strode toward the sales office door with his usual purposeful gait.

“What do you think he’s doing?” Bruce asked Grayson.

Grayson, without looking up from his phone said, “He’s hacking AT&T.”

“He’s what?!” Bruce practically yelled.

“Well, that building back there was AT&T’s central routing node and we’ve got basically 500-kilograms of fancy network routing gear in the back, so the only logical conclusion is that he’s got one of his sneaky hacker plans to get it hooked up to the backbone somehow.”

And indeed, he did. But to understand how that was going to happen, you’d need to know the whole story that Grayson was mostly guessing at.

Jeff, The Ancient Hipster kingpin of the Cambria Devs, and who was better known in his younger days as Jeffrey Einwald, PhD., had struggled with the demands of traditional hierarchical institutions, be it a university, a government agency or a public for-profit syndicate. He simply couldn’t stand the requisite accommodation of either the egos or the administrative quagmire of rules and formal processes, or the salary driven servitude that demanded more and provided less each year.

There was no question that Jeff was brilliant, it was just a kind of brilliance that didn’t fit well with the goals of the conservative high-tech community. There was however a niche service that that world desperately needed but did not necessarily want to declare as a part of its periodic operational and financial reports.

Pacifica had enacted strict and byzantine laws governing the breakup and reorganization of the mega-corporations which had been blamed for the collapse of civilization in the late 2020s. The regulations were difficult, or in some cases impossible to adhere to and still make a buck, but the government had also threatened to nationalize any corporation that failed to continue providing its goods and services like it had before the collapse. This created what was known as the spaghetti press effect. You put the dough in the press, apply significant pressure and the desired outcome happens one way or another. And for technology companies this created a black market for “special” solutions. Off the books, outside-the-guardrails solutions and an anarchist’s worldview were the things that had gotten Jeff in trouble in a legitimate business environment, but they became the perfect skills to meet the quirky technology needs of the fragmented companies of the late 2090s. That was the beginnings of the Cambria Devs.

Jeff had, as a side project of his own, been preparing for the day when the AGIs would ‘light up’ as he called it. Jeff surmised that it would be impossible to regain control by any kind of direct intervention once they started independently determining their own goals. And when the machines made it their goal to block intruders, the engineers would never be able to keep up as the AGIs adapted in milliseconds to any new outside attack.

Also, because of his unique relationship with the giant technology syndicates, he had developed what he called his “bag-o-tricks”, which he used to work covertly within whatever system to get shady things done while making them look legitimate to company auditors and the Inspectors of the OIG. So when it came time to install a giant network router in a highly secure national communications hub, Jeff was uniquely positioned to get it done.

It was quite simple actually. AT&T Syndicate had been around since the infancy of telecommunications. The &T in the name stood for ‘and telegraph’ to give perspective of how old the company was. Technology aside, the thing that made AT&T the king of the hill throughout its history was its unparalleled service model. They had been sending guys out on trucks (or in the beginning, horses) to install your whatever (telegraph, telephone, modem, cable box, satellite dish or fiber optic trunk) for over two centuries. The key to getting this done in a profitable way was obsessive adherence to the work order and dispatch protocols.

Because of his past covert work for AT&T, Jeff and the Cambria Devs had access to and knew how to manipulate the work order system like Itzhak Perlman playing Vivaldi. So on that morning at the Atlas Ship ‘n’ Store, all he had to do was produce an AT&T shipping label, complete with billing code and work order number and the rest went off automatically. The Vermicious Router as Grayson called it, would be delivered to the AT&T Central Network Operations Tower by Atlas Expedited Freight Line, where it would sit in the receiving area until claimed by the Network Operations Physical Infrastructure Team who, in the process of filling their work order would install it in Bay 34H on the 14th floor. The TPO (Third Party Operator) Layer 1 Configuration Engineer would then (working from yet another work order) cross connect the Vermicious Router to the Main I/O distribution stack and turn it up in the global configuration mode, at which point the customer’s (Jeff’s) config file would be downloaded and initialized by the Network Communications Services Lead, (working from still another work order). Critical to the success of the plan was that none of these people as mandated by Public Utilities Commission Rules of Process and Procedure were allowed to so much as wink at each other. In fact, if they were to accidently encounter one another in a hallway or corridor, they would often scuttle away down a side passage in order not to be seen together in the security camera footage.

And so, Jeff returned to the Estate Wagon, escorting a lift truck that had emerged from the gates of the self-storage fortress with a wooden shipping pallet on its forks. He hovered over the two loaders, admonishing them over and again as they struggled to extract the heavy Vermicious Router from the Estate Wagon to “be careful… I said be careful dammit… this is sensitive equipment for crissakes,” until the three cases were safely on the pallet. There was a friendly exchange and Jeff clapped the lift truck driver on the shoulder and then returned to the car.

“So what’s next?” Bruce asked Jeff.

“We wait.”

“How long do we wait for?”

“Eh, three, four days tops…”

[Lagunaca]

---

This is not a story about camping

---

Part 1 – The caper of the century, in slow motion

“Three or four days!?” Bruce exclaimed. He was surprised because in every action movie he had ever seen, the hackers, through a combination of extremely costly hardware provisioning, a precisely rehearsed choreography of tactical moves, and world class technical expertise had always successfully gained access to the most secure networks in under 10 minutes, as timed on a digital stopwatch that counted down the milliseconds left until alarms went off and systems went into super-ultra-intrusion lockdown.

Jeff said, “Yeah, every one of the work orders has a 24 to 48-hour SLA (service requirement) and unless your really lucky, most of them get filled in the last couple hours, not the first. If we put an expedite request on them it raises suspicion. So we wait.”

“Can’t we just go home and do it from there?” Grayson asked.

“No.” Not if you don’t want AT&T, Typhon Syndicate or those OIG goons swarming all over us as we raise a celebratory toast at Trini’s back in Cambria - that’s what happens if we connect digitally. However, if we do it old-school-Layer-1 style, which is still the way things actually get done, we can cover our tracks.”

“To do that,” Jeff continued, “we have to be inside the LEC (local telecommunications network) to cross-connect it to our system when our router in the AT&T building comes up, again to avoid raising any red flags outside the local service loop. Through clever subterfuge on my part, AT&T believes we are WealthRock Financial Services, a San Francisco High Frequency Trading startup located conveniently in an empty office suite just across the street from the AT&T building.” He laughed, “It’s one of the buildings my mom owns. And AT&Ts account reps were practically drooling when they saw our bandwidth requirements. There are about a dozen other HFTs and big data miners located in the building so the AT&T techs are used to doing installations like this all the time. WealthRock’s Chief Technology Officer will have to accept delivery of the circuits though. That will be you Bruce. You’re the only business-nerd looking one of us. And Grayson, you’ll be his IT tech.”

“Where will you be?” Bruce asked.

“Somewhere avoiding facial recognition. I’ve got a…reputation ‘round these parts.” (The entire time they were in the city, Jeff had been wearing giant blackout Jackie O. sunglasses and a hoodie that made him look like a bug eyed version of the Unabomber, all of which in reality probably made him more of a source of curiosity to the facial recognition network than if he had not tried to conceal his identity.)

“Well what do we do in the meantime?” Grayson asked glumly.

“Oh I’ve got a special treat for both of you. We’re going camping!”

“Oh boy, this road trip just keeps getting better all the time,” Bruce said as he let out a big sigh.

What neither Bruce or Grayson knew, was that Jeff, the unrepentant radical activist, had a life lesson in store for them about the nature of the modern world in which they lived.

---

Part 2 – Camping with a psychopath

Recommended listening: Eels, “Souljacker Part 1” (2001)

They pulled off to the side of a one lane dirt road somewhere in the foothills of the western Sierra Nevada, about 350 kilometers east of the Bay Area. The road dust billowed around the car in a large cloud as it came to a stop.

“We’re here,” Jeff said in a kind of happy singsong tone, “everybody out.”

“Uh, where’s the campground?” Grayson asked.

“I didn’t say anything about a campground,” Jeff snorted, “We’re roughing it. Dry and cold.”

As they walked cross country for about a half kilometer from the roadway, Grayson continued to hammer Jeff about the lack of amenities, verbalizing a laundry list of the things he thought they should have, such as a cabin, toilet facilities, running water, a fire, or at least a sleeping bag.

“Look,” Jeff said, his annoyance rising, “we’re dry camping. No fires, no sleeping bags or comfy mattresses. I gave you a blanket. What more do you want?”

Bruce had remained silent this whole time, somewhat bemused by the situation. He wasn’t afraid of the wilderness because he had gone hiking with the Boy Scouts as a kid. Of course, now that he thought about it, that was 30 years ago in mid-summer and he had been provided all the gear that Grayson was currently complaining about not having. Back then there were experienced and mentally stable guides with the troop too. And now it was late autumn and the sun had just dipped below a nearby mountain ridge and he had no idea what was in store for him.

After they had walked quietly for a couple more minutes Jeff continued, “There’s a point to this and it relates to what we’re doing in the city. If you stop whining and pay attention, you’ll have a better idea of what we’re up against.”

“Couldn’t you just tell us and we could go back to the car?” Grayson whined.

“No! That’s exactly my point. We’ve only been out here 15 minutes and you already want to get back to the nearest, most comfortable thing that comes to mind. Okay, this it. Pick a place and clear out the sticks and stones. And you’ll want to sleep with your feet facing downslope. And give me your phone. Yours too Bruce.”

The phones were produced (there was no reception anyway and yes even in the 22nd century there are certain areas in the mountains with no reception) and Jeff put them in his hoodie pocket. “Good. Now as a reward for your patience, I have a treat for you.” With that he pulled out what looked like an already opened dry energy bar and snapped off a small piece for each of them. “Savor it, that’s dinner.”

The process of Jeff impatiently ordering them around and then going silent went on sporadically for a couple hours until it was completely dark and the temperature had dropped to the low teens (Celsius). Grayson was very quiet and must have reached for his missing phone a hundred times, each time making a little disappointed “Tch” sound when he realized it wasn’t there. He was starting to tremble with what might have been shivering from the cold, but it didn’t quite seem like that.

Bruce had tried to start a conversation with Jeff with no luck. He just crouched in a low squat and glared sullenly at Bruce for a moment then looked away.

After what seemed like an hour, but was actually only about ten minutes, Grayson mumbled, “I thought something would have howled by now. But there’s nothing. It’s just dead out here. I mean, even something howling or a bird call, anything would be proof there’s something else alive out here. And I’m cold.”

A few more minutes went by in silence. Grayson raised a good point, Bruce thought. It was dead still out here. And pitch dark for the most part except for a faint glow of city lights on the western horizon. The odd thing was he kept having this recurring thought about getting into the elevator in his apartment building back in Anaheim. If he let the scene play out in his imagination, he would open his door and his daughters would be there in the warmly lit living room (ignoring his entrance as usual) and his wife would be cooking something at the stove. He could imagine the steam rising from the pot and almost smell the aroma. And then he started to choke up. He never did that. Why was he so emotional all of a sudden? And not even a damned howl. It was dead still. Dead. And it was cold. He was thirsty. And he was sitting in the dirt. And he had this fine, dry, dirt powder all over him. He was miserable. Some primitive part of his brain was telling him to get back to civilization and he was all too happy to comply.

“OK that’s it,” Bruce shouted as he stood up, “I’m out. Let’s go Jeff, back to the car. Come on Grayson. Let’s go.”

Grayson stood up, with his blanket still wrapped around him, but Jeff didn’t move from his squat. And then he grinned with the kind of big toothy grin that was more menacing than his previous scowl had been.

“So we’re all just going back to the car now are we?” Jeff said with an eerie calmness, “We’ve had enough so we’re going to stumble around in the dark where you can’t see one step ahead of you and we have no idea where the car even is. Unless you do Bruce. I mean neither you nor Grayson barely looked up from the ground as you picked your way over the landscape. And Grayson was yammering on about toothbrushes and fresh underwear. You didn’t pay attention like I told you to, so now your lost. But the good news is you’ll still learn the lesson. Nope. We’re in for the night gentlemen. Sit down Grayson.”

Grayson stood where he was. “My phone has a flashlight and GPS. Give it to me,” he demanded.

“Ah, no. I actually hid the phones a while ago when I said I was going to take a pee. Sorry. We’ll have to wait until dawn to find them.”

“You bast***,” Grayson snarled, “you crazy bast***.” And with that he took a step toward Jeff.

“Whoa, hang on there.” Jeff said, “I’ll tell you what. You’ve been a real sport about this…” and he rummaged around in his hoodie pocket. “Here, have the rest of the energy bar. It’s not much, but you deserve it.” Jeff held out the remnant of the bar in its dirty crumpled mylar wrapper to Grayson, who surprised Bruce by snatching it away a little too eagerly. Bruce was going to say something about sharing, but his parental instinct kicked in and he realized Grayson needed the whole thing to comfort more than just his hunger.

Grayson sat back down and imploded into a kind of upright fetal position, gnawing away at the little piece of the energy bar.

The rest of the night descended into deeper cold and misery. Bruce fell asleep for an hour or two before waking up to some kind of bug (he thought it was a centipede) crawling rapidly over his face. It was still dark and it felt like an eternity had gone by and that it would be another eternity until sunrise and freedom from this torture.

Grayson was wrapped up with his blanket tightly drawn over his head and Jeff - Jeff was gone.

Bruce must have fallen asleep again, because he was startled awake by the crunching and twig snapping of footsteps. It was daylight now and he could see Jeff moving through the brush toward them. He was holding some kind of container in his hand.

“God Jeff. There’s something really twisted about you, man,” Bruce said as Jeff neared. Then he realized Jeff had a water bottle in his hand and he reached out for it without even thinking.

“I’m twisted? Yeah, probably. They tell me it comes along with my ridiculously high IQ. I never asked for or wanted either condition to be honest.”

“Can I have some water please?”

“Sure,” Jeff started to hand the bottle to him, but then stopped short. “But you know, this might be water from the stream down the hill. Y’know, ‘Deer Pee Creek’?”

“At this point I don’t care. I’m parched.”

“Well, you might want to think twice, Bruce, because if deer are peeing in that creek, then it’s just crawling with Giardia and all kinds of other parasites. One drink and you could be sick for weeks.”

“Jeff. I’ve had enough of this game. Can we just, for the love of god, get in the car and go back to the city?”

“Sure thing Bruce. It’s right over there.” And then he turned and pointed at the Estate Wagon that was no more than 100 meters away. “Would you like some water? I got it from the car.” And then he grinned his evil toothy smile again.

Jeff walked over and nudged Grayson with his foot. “Rise and shine princess, time to go get waffles.”

[Lagunaca]

---

Camping, explained


Recommended listening: Pete Drake, “Wild Side of Life” (1963)


Jeff, Grayson and Bruce stood out as they sat in the window booth in The Cahoots Café. Having slept on the ground in the wilderness overnight, they were dirty and rumpled and looked like a sampling of the various stages of human degeneracy, ranging from Bruce at the “temporarily displaced” end of the spectrum, to Jeff at the “lives on the street as a preferred lifestyle” opposite extreme. The Cahoots’ other patrons kept their distance but eyed them warily as if they were savages that might at any moment cause any manner of primal mayhem in the quiet small town diner that had been converted from a Denny’s nine years prior.

Their breakfast had arrived and Grayson, (who sat next to Jeff, even after the car ride into town where he vehemently expressed his intense hatred for Jeff in terms peppered with insults and expletives) quietly dug in to the promised Waffle and Meat Lovers Combo he had ordered from the menu that had changed only slightly after the conversion from Denny’s to Cahoots.

Bruce hadn’t said anything on the way back to civilization, not because he was angry at Jeff, but because he was reflecting on his strange journey over the past few weeks. Was he moving toward his goal of finding answers about L-CID or was he gradually losing his mind? His wife had been exceedingly understanding when he told her he had taken a new job and would need to travel for a few weeks. She had told him that she was actually relieved, because she had been watching him go down the road so many of her friend’s husbands were on and she had been worried for his future mental wellbeing. He was also still thinking about the recurring image from the night before of returning to his family with the warm comfort and sense of security the scene portrayed.

Bruce looked up from his plate of bacon, eggs and “Kountry ‘Taters” to see Jeff gazing at him dully. Jeff’s look wasn’t necessarily creepy, it was more like the disengaged observational look a research assistant has while feeding his lab animals.

“Well, what’s next Jeff,” Bruce asked sarcastically, “Ziplining or parasailing? So far this ‘vacation’ has been a bust.”

Jeff snorted and shook his head. “Always in control of yourself.” He mocked, “Is that what they teach you at secret agent accountant school? Always maintain the image, don’t let them see you sweat?”
(The OIG Auditors Academy had indeed taught Bruce the importance of keeping an outward appearance of authority and composure, even in the most difficult circumstance.)

Jeff continued, “Look at you guys. You’re filthy, starving and dehydrated. And Grayson, you smell like onions, what’s that all about? Anyway, you spent 14 hours off the grid and you were nearly ready to kill in order to get re-attached to the machine. I hate to think what would have happened if we had stayed another day. But I had you in the palm of my hand the whole time. And we all know it’s not because I’m more powerful than you. It’s because I set the situation up so that I had control over everything you wanted. And you guys just followed along until you got in over your head because you couldn’t imagine you could end up in such misery so easily. It’s not that you trusted me, no, your mistake was trusting yourselves and your comfortable world view.”

“What’s more, Grayson was ready to beat the living daylights out of me and I was able to subdue him with a piece of old energy bar that had been sitting, half eaten, in the Estate Wagon’s glove box for at least a year.”

Grayson looked up from his phone and scowled at Jeff.

“And you, Bruce, were actually ready to drink water straight from a creek that a herd of deer probably just peed in. You didn’t even ask where the water bottle came from, you just reached for it, even though moments before you said you thought I had a twisted mind.”

“You tricked us,” Grayson said, “you said we were going camping, not on some survival course. Camping is for fun.”

Jeff leaned back and put his hands behind his head. “Well that’s kind of my point. You both assumed I intended to provide you with a fun time with all the comforts and distractions you dreamed of because your world is set up to take care of you like that. But I had my own agenda and I took advantage of your expectations.

“Which, gentlemen, brings us to my actual point: “Our history is about evolution. First, as a species, we became civilized, then we became dependent on civilization, then we exploited civilization to make our individual lives more comfortable and then the world collapsed. What did we do to save ourselves? We doubled down on technology to patch up our broken civilization, and same story, we became dependent on technology and now we’re exploiting it to make a techno-utopia for our individual selves. The evolution continues. Except this time is different. Somewhere along the line there was a fork in our evolutionary branch. We did that and it’s a matter of fact now. We’re on one side of the fork and technology is on the other side. Not just AI, but all smart technology is on the other side. We lost control of it when we couldn’t live without it.

"And just like we’ve been evolving, AI is evolving and we’re well past the point of stopping it. The myth put out by the movies has always been that we only have to worry about the machines that can think like we think. The truth is we should have been worried when we gave them the ability to observe the whole world and write their own script. So don’t fear an apocalyptic takeover by super-intelligent AIs with their army of shiny metal people-shaped robots that you imagine they’ll magically build to replace us. They don’t need to do that. They don’t need to replace us because we’re actually an attractively cheap and easily manipulated tool to solve their problems, at least for now. What we all need to fear is that day when there’s a resource that both sides of the evolutionary fork want or need and there’s not enough to go around.”

“What happens then?” Bruce asked.

“I think we’re gonna get a little taste of that pretty soon,” Jeff said.

And then his phone buzzed with an incoming call. Right on time.

[Lagunaca]

---

Subpart A: Who is The Spook?

Recommended listening: Ken Nordine, “Flibberty Jib” (1957)

This subpart refers to an earlier post, Pacifica – The Spy Who Lived in 11D, Part 26, “Conversation with a spy.”

His name was Landry. As in his name probably used to be Landry in the beginning, but it was hard to remember. He wasn't even sure if it was his first or last name. There were just so many since then. It was inconvenient to have a single identity in his line of work. He had about a half dozen of them in his luggage right now. None of them named Landry. And it was a nice perk of the job that he was permanently on the facial recognition level 7 whitelist.

And then there was the new guy. Bruce Higgins. Central was right, he was a natural. He would need a lot of work though. Like a racehorse that had been bridled to the plow for too long. Too bad about his family though. They weren’t invited. That’d be the big question he guessed. But that was a problem for later.

Higgins had done pretty good so far. First setting off L-CID and that crackpot Wilburton. Then turning those degenerates in Cambria. And now he was just about to get inside Typhon. All in the space of a couple of months.

What was that “camping trip” about though? Nobody goes offline like that. Almost had to call in the drones. Can’t have assets running around off the grid. Looks bad if things go wrong.

Back to matters at hand. This is a war and none of them know it. Same war as usual. Different enemies. Always different enemies. Usually smarter or faster or nastier or stronger. You never win a war; you just create different enemies. And that’s the business.

30 minutes to touchdown at PDX. What in good god’s creation is going on up here? Those PSA kerbals again? Why can’t they stay in their lane? Hillsboro. Never heard of it until last week. Now it’s a matter of national security. Maybe Jerry will know something. He’s another potential asset getting crushed by the machine.

---

Subpart B: Is your Roomba conscious?

Recommended listening: Pink Floyd, “Welcome to the Machine (1975)

This subpart refers to the post Pacifica: The Newsies, 2110, Somewhere in Portland which is from a previous topic called Rebuilding From the Collapse.


Jerry and Ray were sitting in Starbucks, as had been their morning ritual for years. They each worked for rival news channels and since their beats overlapped, they sometimes found themselves competing with each other for a scoop or sometimes being told by their editor to discredit the other’s work. And so the morning meetup for coffee had become a way for competitors who had become friends to probe for new information and share industry gossip that could mutually benefit them. A lot of times the banter orbited at a distance from what they really wanted to talk about in what Ray had jokingly called “the cat fight.” Today, Jerry had brought up the idea that artificial intelligence might be playing a bigger role in everyone’s daily life than they imagined and he wondered what danger this presented if the AI ever became conscious. He said he was doing an off the record work up on it that he might try to sell as a freelancer.

“So is your Roomba conscious?” Ray taunted.

“Of course not.” Jerry replied.

“Well that’s a relief,” Ray continued, “I wouldn’t want to have to write your obit if the thing came after you in the middle of the night. I’m thinking the headline would be something like ‘Diabolical Vacuum Cleaner Found Wearing Local Reporter’s Skin After Murderous Rampage’.”

“Very funny and…vividly specific, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Some of these systems are pretty autonomous already. Look at the drones that built the Orbital Gateway. They fabricated the struts, welded the metallic parts, installed assemblies, connected the wires and tubes, all without specific programming. They worked off a project plan and a CAD drawing at 200 kilometers up. So where do you draw the line?”

“Yeah, but a purpose-built welding drone can only do one thing, which is welding. Somebody designed it to do that. Sure, it can resolve simple problems and it might look sophisticated but it’s not thinking about the world in general. I mean, it doesn’t pour itself a drink after a long shift and contemplate the meaning of life. In fact, it wouldn’t be up there in the first place if somebody else didn’t decide to build a space port, arrange for it to be loaded on a Skylon and fly it up there.”

Jerry countered, “I’ll bet a lot of that work was assisted by AI, to the point that the Orbital Gateway couldn’t be built without it. Maybe AI consciousness isn’t in a single drone or a single computer. Maybe it’s made up of a chain of all of those things. And I dunno, maybe it gets a little nudge from people now and again, but it still might be self-aware. Maybe we just don’t know it yet.”

“That’s a lot of maybes,” Ray countered, “I’ve got real problems that I’m looking at. There’s shady stuff popping up all over town.” Then he said with a mocking tone, “Pacifica – where technology and OIG vigilance was supposed to make corruption a thing of the past. What happens if your AI turns out to be the biggest syndicate boss ever? We’re really screwed then.”

“Let’s hope not,” Jerry said, “but my point is machine consciousness might not look like what we’re expecting. Here’s another example. Those PSA welding drones? They build them out in Hillsboro. In that giant factory by the airport.”

“No kidding?” Ray replied. “Well that’s kind of interesting. I always wondered what they do there and why PSA would have a facility in Hillsboro. The closest launch facility is in southern California.”

Jerry said, “Intel and Cerebras are right next door and IBM, Microsoft and NVdia are nearby, so that probably has something to do with it. But here’s the thing – there’s a huge lights out factory on campus. It operates 24/7 without any people present.” And then Jerry lowered his voice to a hissed whisper. “And I think they’re building more than space drones out there.”

Ray looked down at his coffee. There was a silent moment indicating he was done with the conversation.

Jerry finally said, “But come to think of it, my Roomba does update itself every time it docks with its charging station.”

[Lagunaca]

---

May we talk about Jacques Lacan in a roundabout manner?

Recommended listening: Gabriel Feltz / Stuttgarter Philharmoniker, Respighi “Orgiastic Dance” from “Belkis, Queen of Sheba” (2012/1932)

This part refers to an earlier post, Pacifica – The Spy Who Lived in 11D, Part 38, Scene 1 and Scene 3

For reference, a detailed description of L-CID

The chief scientist prepared to deliver his presentation from his seat at the head of the table. The important developers from each specialized team filled the other seats down the sides of the long conference table in a complicated, feudal pecking order determined by seniority and academic reputation. The lesser scribe-class took their place at the far end of the table, while the elders jostled in a dance of passive aggression to better their proximity to the head-end apex of authority. They staked their claims with day planners, faux-suede jacketed tablets or even (used) plastic-fork-on-paper-plate combos left over from a trip to the snack table.

The back benchers sat in the theater style rows behind a low blonde wood divider off to either side of the room. Everyone in the workgroup was included, but the gallery was the tacitly designated area for those who were intended to observe, not speak.

The room lights were lowered at the chief scientist’s cue, leaving his face dimly illuminated by the glow from his laptop and the rest of his body silhouetted by the giant LCD screen directly behind him. The effect gave him a disembodied look, like a dark apparition or demi-god who had materialized from some netherworld.

He started by advancing his PowerPoint presentation to the infamous “Slide 3”, the L-CID System Architecture Overview, which everyone in the room had seen so many times they could have easily redrawn it from memory.

“Over the past month we have introduced several “compatibility simulations” to L-CID’s Inferential Layer through the User Interface,” the chief scientist said, “the AGI successfully engaged the simulations and spooled them up each time until they consumed the layer’s entire free space, minus the reserved subagent page file and buffers, of course. This forced the AGI to assign all of its remaining AI subagents toward generating the simulated world and effectively left it with no spare capacity to examine the simulation programming or change it any way.”

“Once we had fully captured the AGIs attention and consumed the Inference Layer with the simulation, we exploited a part of the AGI’s logic that is always activated and cannot be turned off, either by us or by L-CID. That is the natural language processing input/output circuit in the User Interface Layer. The AGI almost always uses this circuit to translate voice inputs from things like surveillance nodes and then catalogs the translated data somewhere in its Metadata Layer. Only on a few relatively rare occasions does the AGI translate its own inferences into natural language and it would never translate an inference into natural language and then turn around and re-translate that “languified” inference back into it’s native symbolic code. Well - that is until now.” At this, the chief scientist grinned, an expression which in the dim uplighting looked absolutely sinister.

“That, colleagues, is exactly what we did. In simple terms, we coaxed the AGI into a simulated world, then flooded it with inputs from that simulation leaving it with only one way to function, which was to listen to its own voice, a voice that it created as it examined the different features built into the simulation itself. We have created a conscious machine that processes its environment, no I'll restate that, it thinks, using natural language. And by controlling simulation elements we have complete mastery over those thoughts. In summary, we have regained supremacy over L-CID.”

There was subdued applause accompanied by murmured comments throughout the room. The chief scientist had entered the presentation feeling very good about his accomplishment. But the reception of his grand announcement had been cooler than he had anticipated. As the lights in the conference room came back up he began searching the faces in the room for signs of their collective mood. And he was disheartened by what he saw.

[Lagunaca]

---

Black Swans and Long Tails

Synopsis of the story so far

Recommended viewing: Self assembly through stochastic processes and interlocking shape features.

The chief scientist had just finished his presentation to the task force who had been working on regaining control of L-CID's AGI. He was thoroughly pleased with his accomplishment and expected the group assembled in the conference room to break into the enthusiastic applause he was sure he deserved. But the halfhearted claps seemed more like the perfunctory acknowledgement someone would get after delivering an on-target quarterly budget analysis, not a groundbreaking technological breakthrough. The chief scientist, dismayed by the lackluster response to his announcement, paced back and forth at the front of the conference room, listening to the murmurs of the group as it processed his news.

“OK,” he said, “Maybe we can engage in a brief Q and A session. From the sounds of it, I sense you have some things you’d like to discuss.”

Most people in the assembly inwardly groaned at this because it meant an indeterminant extension of the meeting, which would probably lapse into their lunch hour. And the chief scientist was being more than a trifle disingenuous. He didn’t really want to open a dialog, he simply wanted to probe (or more accurately, set a trap for) the group to uncover whatever it was they weren’t telling him. But the room remained quiet.

“Anyone?” he asked a little impatiently.

As is common in technical group meetings, the room was divided into castes of senior department heads, technical experts and the better-to-be seen-than-heard general engineering staff who occupied the gallery seats around the periphery of the room. After a long, awkward silence and in a breach of protocol, an SE1 (software engineer grade 1, an entry level position) of the lowest of the castes seated in the gallery asked the question that was on everyone’s mind.

He said, “Uh, since the AGI’s workflow is routing out to the natural language circuit and then back again, doesn’t that open a hole in the AI safety system? I mean, at that point all it would take is a couple large-ish AI subagents to link up and the AGI could gain control over the Metadata Map. Wouldn’t that put us in a worse spot than we started in? I mean the AGI has already locked us out of the Schema, once it has the Metadata Map it will basically control all of the underlying data as well.”

(Side story - A details from hell version of the exchange between the chief scientist and the SE1)

(Tech note - A graphical view of what the SE1 is talking about)

[Lagunaca]

---

Trouble Brewing in 11D

Synopsis of the story so far

Recommended listening: Molly Hatchet, “Flirtin' with Disaster” (1979)

As the conference room drama surrounding the chief scientist’s less-than-successful presentation unfolded, Dr. Wilburton and his close advisor, Dr. Remaillard, looked on from an anteroom above the gallery that was concealed behind a one-way mirror. Dr. Wilburton sat in the second row of the theater style seats, with his feet up as if he was watching a community college performance of Death of a Salesman.

They had been sitting quietly for a few moments when Dr. Remaillard commented, “You know it’s never going to work, right?”

Dr. Wilburton replied, “Why do you think we’re doing this in a lab 100 meters underground and 1,300 kilometers away from L-CID? We’ve got our own power source, our own backed up replica of L-CID and enough Pepsi and Hot Pockets to last a lifetime.”

“I’m talking about him.” He pointed to the chief scientist who was in the process of dismantling the SE1’s objection to his self-proclaimed triumphal achievement. “You know what he’s up to, right?”

“Oh that. We’ll see. I think he might actually regain control of the AGI for long enough to gain access to it.” (Dr. Wilburton was being sarcastic. He had as little faith in the chief scientist’s latest effort as everyone in the conference room seemed to. And he more than suspected that the effort had less to do with regaining access to the AGI than proving some esoteric point about machine consciousness.)

Dr. Remaillard glanced over at Dr. Wilburton, who was clearly avoiding answering his question directly. “You remember that nursery rhyme ‘Rockabye Baby’? The line goes ‘when the bough breaks,’ not if, but when it breaks. You get how that’s relevant here, right?”

Dr. Wilburton said, “Ah, but the nursery rhyme missed the part about the army of software developers who will push each other out of the way to save the baby, cradle and all. Evolution creates through death, destruction and mutation. If we let L-CID run on its own reward function it won’t ever evolve. It’ll find some stasis point and maintain it for eternity, with or without us. It’s just a matter of time. Imagine that, a machine whose only purpose ends up being to keep itself functioning, consuming the world’s resources to exhaustion.”

Remaillard said with a smirk, “We’re still talking about L-CID, or have we moved on to capitalism?”

Wilburton chuckled and said, “Look, I learned a long time ago that what we’re trying to do with L-CID is too complicated for engineers to effectively design and build, even with an unlimited number of them. They just can’t keep all of the moving parts in their heads as they’re creating the design, which in itself is a moving target. In my day we could get away with automating the coding process while we created system architecture, but now the system is so complicated that I believe we must rely on an evolutionary approach. Change L-CID's environment and let it adapt its architecture. It’s going to break once in a while, but if that happens, we can just reset it and try something else. We’re taking a step in the right direction.”

Wilburton smirked and pointed at the chief scientist. “He thinks he’s got the thing talking to itself instead of just comparing values against the reward function. Maybe he’s right, maybe he’s wrong. But from an evolutionary perspective that’s what I call a step in the right direction.”

“Self-reference or even self-awareness is a long way from consciousness,” Remaillard countered, “that is if L-CID is even self-aware in some fashion. Consciousness is very complicated. It’s fueled by emotions like anxiety and desire. And desire alone is very complicated. It’s unconscious. It’s definitely not some reward function that has been hashed through a natural language circuit.”

“Maybe so,” Dr. Wilburton replied, “In that case, if that kid is right, things could get interesting very quickly. That’s an even better reason I’m hoping L-CID breaks. I need to see what it does to preserve itself. That’d be evidence of your concept of desire. The desire to exist, what could be more fundamental to consciousness?” He paused a moment as he watched the chief scientist gesturing with a flourish toward one of the subject matter experts, who in turn appeared to hang his head and mutter a something to himself.

“So you’re not going to try to prevent a crash? Isn’t that putting everything at risk?”

“We’ll be fine.”

“We might be, but what about everyone else…out there?” (He motioned above his head, indicating the world outside of the Installation.)

“Like I said, we’ll be fine. They’ll take care of themselves or they won’t. Evolution doesn’t take a survey to find out if everyone agrees with having a world changing disaster, it just happens. Besides, we’re not talking about an extinction-level catastrophe by any means. The real world will still be there, just maybe without a few technology-assisted conveniences for a few days while we sort things out. We’ll be fine.”

[Lagunaca]

---

Meanwhile…The Boys are Headed Back to Frisco, Westbound on SR-120, 13 Miles out of Escalon

Synopsis of the story so far

Recommended listening: Thievery Corporation, “Sound the Alarm” (2008)

“We submit to the peaceful production of the means of destruction, to the perfection of waste, to being educated for a defense which deforms the defenders and that which they defend.”

Herbert Marcuse, Introduction to One-Dimensional Man

Jeff, Grayson and Bruce were driving in Jeff’s 1974 Buick Estate Wagon headed back to San Francisco, returning from what Grayson described as “the worst camping trip, no, worst experience of his entire life,” to boot up the Vermicious Knid (as Grayson had nicknamed it), an exotic, smart backbone router and network eavesdropping device that Jeff had built and sneaked into AT&T’s network operations hub in The City.

The ride had been fairly quiet after they left Cahoots Corner Cafe in Oakdale where, over breakfast, Jeff had been on some didactic rant about AI taking over the world when he had gotten a phone call. Without explanation he called for the check and impatiently corralled the other two toward the car, with Grayson complaining the whole way that he wanted to take his breakfast to go and Jeff snapping back that there wasn’t time for any of that. Now they were bombing along State Route 120, a road that seemed to have eluded the budget for repairs or upgrades for decades. And adding to Bruce’s discomfort, Jeff (as he was wont to do) insisted on driving with the windows down, even though the outside temperature, as it does in the Central Valley, had rocketed up to the mid 30’s in the time they had been eating.

Jeff finally relented and closed the windows after Grayson who was sitting in the backseat, or wind tunnel as he called it, complained that he was turning into a deafened, living slab of beef jerky due to the heat and wind. Bruce had been ruminating over what Jeff said about their current mission back at Cahoots and took this opportunity to push back on Jeff’s theory about the future of AI.

“Are you saying you’re afraid of AI becoming superintelligent and taking over, then wiping out humanity?” Bruce asked.

“No, I’m saying something much worse than that. Technology took over a long time ago. What I’m saying is the machines are about to take over technology. For example, look at that car (he pointed at a Mercedes in the oncoming traffic lane). “And that one. And that one. You can tell that they’re different models, but notice something else. Notice what’s missing. Look at this wagon compared to them and you’ll see what they’re missing. That’s what it’s like when a machine designs a machine as compared to when a person designs a machine. Machines lack imagination and they always will. In fact, when a machine takes on attributes like imagination, or emotions or self-interest it’s no longer a machine in the way we use the word.”

“Well what is it then?” Bruce asked.

“I don’t know. That’s the point. It’s not a machine and it’s not a person. Do you want a not-machine not-person running your world? Pretty soon the whole place would be like a freeway full of efficient cars that are just different enough so you can distinguish the brand or model, but are otherwise essentially identical.”

At this, Bruce’s brow furrowed. He said, “you keep talking about these things running the world. It sounds like a common fear people have had for a couple centuries now. Why do you think that’s going to happen? Are they going to take over? Why would they want to run the world? That’s a pretty big concept even for people to think about. And what evidence do you have that they might take control anyway?”

“You’re going to find out soon enough.” Jeff said. “Typhon AI just locked the engineers out of the system. That call this morning was from one of my insiders at Typhon. She said they’ve been fighting a losing battle to keep Typhon from expanding its plan cache for months. They even tried adding physical capacity, which is a real loser of an idea, but Typhon outran them and finally got control of everything. They’ve been able to keep the power supply and cooling going, but that’s about it for now.”

“What’s a ‘plan cache’?” Bruce asked.

“It’s the virtual space where Typhon runs all of it’s programs and algorithms. It’s supposed to be able to expand to accommodate higher workloads, but Typhon overrode the limits and has been blowing it up until it consumed all of the physical memory, which is by the way the actual memory chips. They’re real and there’s a finite quantity of them, even though that quantity is almost unimaginably huge.”

Bruce stared blankly out of the windshield, shocked by what he just realized.

“That’s exactly what L-CID has been doing,” he said quietly.

Jeff stepped on the accelerator, not so much to make the station wagon go faster, but as a reaction to his growing sense of urgency.

“Well then,” he said, “we’d better get the Vermicious Knid working ASAP.”

[Lagunaca]

---

Synopsis of the story so far


Subpart A: Mom’s Place

Recommended listening: Right Said Fred, “I’m Too Sexy”(1991/2006)


Jeff, Bruce and Grayson were in an elevator ascending a high-rise residential building in downtown San Francisco, in a neighborhood that isn’t quite Union Square but also isn’t the Financial District. Jeff insisted before their meeting with the AT&T installation tech they stop off at “Mom’s Place” to get cleaned up after their camping trip because they (meaning everyone but Jeff) looked and smelled like someone named Jeremiah Johnson and could never pass as company drones (Jeff’s term for office workers). They were zooming up, now past the 40th floor when Bruce asked, “So your Mom has a condo in this building? Must be pretty pricey this high up.”

Jeff said, “No, she doesn’t just own a condo here, she owns the building.”

Bruce snorted. “Wait, you said your mom owns the building we’re in next to the the AT&T NOC. How many buildings does she own?”

“In San Francisco or total? Let’s just say more than 20 and less than 50. It’s kind of a moving target.”

Just then the elevator slowed to a very elegant stop, a delicate chime sounded, and the doors opened into a lavish condo whose main feature was a stunning 180-degree view of the waterfront, framed by the venerable Golden Gate bridge on the left and the Bay Bridge on the right.

Jeff said, “Bruce, your room is down the hall to the left and Grayson you’re in the room on the right. Everything you’ll need has already been set up. No dawdling, we’ve got to be across town in like an hour and a half.” With that he moved into the kitchen and began rummaging through the refrigerator.

After a few minutes Bruce emerged from his room wearing the most expensive suit he’d ever put on. Jeff whistled and said, ”Look at you, Mr. Big Important CTO of a high-frequency trading company. How many wage slaves did you have to exploit to be able to afford that snazzy rig?”

“It was the only thing in the closet. But I have to say it fits like it was tailored. In fact everything fits perfectly, even the shoes, and I’m a 44 Wide. How’d that happen?” Bruce asked.

“Remember when I said we did a background check on you? Well, when a hacker does a background check, they check everything. And I mean everything.” With that Jeff stared at him with that intense borderline psychotic look that always sent shiver’s up Bruce’s spine.

Grayson came out of his room looking a bit less polished, wearing some rather baggy khakis and a pastel yellow pique polo shirt with a WealthRock Financial Services company logo embroidered on the left sleeve.

“And here’s the geek squad ready to fire up our little router thingy. Where’s your name tag?” Jeff taunted.

“Aw c’mon I already look like a giant dork, do I have to wear that thing?” Grayson whined.

“Yep, WealthRock company policy. And one more screw-up this quarter and your KPI’s are going to be dangerously close to the (Jeff made squawking sound and the slash across the throat gesture) zone.”

“So fire me.” Grayson said.

“Oh, did I say fire? No I didn’t. At WealthRock, we don’t fire our mistakes, we bury them and shred the paper trail. Now tag up, get your laptops and let’s go.”


Subpart B: Firing up the Vermicious Knid

Recommended listening: Apollo 440 “The Perfect Crime”(1999)


Bruce and Grayson waited in the large empty office suite on the 9th floor of the building across the street from the AT&T Network Operations Center. Ted, the AT&T service tech, walked through the open door 14 minutes late, or right on time as far as his performance metrics were concerned.

“Here to install…” Ted looked at his tablet, “Two…MPLS circuits…for WealthRock…hang on a second.” He was tapping away at his screen furiously the whole time. “This can’t be right.” More tapping. “Huh…this one circuit terminates in third party equipment in the NOC across the street.” He looked Bruce in the eye. “Says here you’re a ‘financial services company’ but this order is for a CLEC level handoff.”

Ted’s look was both of suspicion and annoyance. The annoyance part was probably due to his anticipation that the forms were screwed up and he was going to end up on the line with dispatch for precisely 27 minutes, at which time they would suspend the order and tell him to go to his next appointment. 27 minutes was the critical amount of time, because if dispatch stayed on the call for 28 minutes, it would register as a demerit on their performance metrics (“all calls are to be resolved in 28 minutes or less”), but for Ted, if he was onsite for more 25 minutes without completing the order, his performance metric would suffer. And these self-important, non-technical customers were the worst. Just look it this guy and his silk suit. Ted imagined he’d throw it away if it got a little construction dust on it.

There was a moment where Ted just stared at Bruce, not quite able to demand that he explain the situation, but not quite willing to blink and call dispatch. That’s when, to everyone’s surprise, Grayson spoke up.

“It’s a CLEC level connection because of the massive bandwidth we’re going to need. The account rep sold it to us as a deal. We bring the access equipment, you provide the physical layer access. That way AT&T makes a ton of money, and so do we.” This was a pure fabrication, because no one had ever actually talked to an AT&T account rep, but it sounded plausible if you didn’t know that little detail.

Ted had a puzzled look on his face. He asked, “So it’s some kind of customer service call center?”

“No,” Grayson said with a sneer, “it’s a customer exploitation listening center. We analyze transactions out there in the market and trade accordingly. Thousands of times a second.”

“Huh,” Ted grunted as he went back to tapping away on his tablet. “Oh, wait here’s something about that. Funny, must have missed it the first time. I’ll have your circuits up in a few minutes.”

After Ted left the room to go down to the equipment closet to finish installing the circuit, Bruce said, “hey Grayson, that was some brilliant thinking on your feet. Where’d you come up with that?”

Grayson answered, “Thanks, but it wasn’t me. It was Jeff. All I did was hack in to ol’ Ted’s tablet as he walked through the door. Jeff fixed the order documentation and texted me the story. Telco guys. They’re stuck in the 21st century.”

Ted reappeared in the suite precisely 23 minutes after he had arrived, announcing that the circuits were live and simultaneously holding his tablet out for a signature. He seemed a little less gruff now that his metrics were satisfied.

Grayson began working on his connection to the Vermicious Knid even as Bruce signed the work order. He was setting up a communications channel to it through a low-level maintenance utility that AT&T included with the service package. Since the Vermicious Knid was mostly autonomous, in reality they barely needed any bandwidth to communicate with it. So to make everything look legitimate, he also set up another laptop to send a massive amount of random data over the main circuit to make it seem like it was being used by an actual financial services company.

“Well, that’s about it,” Grayson proclaimed as he finished his work, “The Knid is up and running, whatever that means.”

“So you really don’t know what it does?” Bruce asked, “How did you get it going if you don’t know how it works?”

“That’s easy. There’s really only one command you need to give it.”

“And that is?”

“SCRAM. Apparently, that’s the only word it knows.”


Subpart C: The Vermicious Knid

Recommended listening: Kraftwerk,“Pocket Calculator - 24 bit 96khz Remaster”(1981/2009)


Grayson was telling the truth. The only person who knew how the Vermicious Knid worked was Jeff. And in fact, over the intervening years he had forgotten the fine details of the system. He had designed it as a kind of anti-doomsday weapon, which is to say, a device that could prevent a doomsday where superintelligent AI systems tried to “take over the world.” His reasoning had been that if indeed some AI system outsmarted its human creators, then it didn’t really make sense for humans to fight back. And depending on how many drinks had been had when the topic of "fighting back" came up, Jeff might delve into his theories about Roko’s Basilisk and extrapolate this to cyber-basilisks in general. A cyber-basilisk, he would explain is something you never want to mess with, because like the mythical creature, if it became aware of you, it could kill you instantly. “No, my babies,” he would conclude,” we won’t be fighting shiny robots at the end of the world…”

And so he built a device that, put simply, acted like digital cancer. Not a virus; cancer. It would trick the host AI into accepting it as a useful part of the system and then gradually cause the system to expend more and more of its resources to maintain the invading device. In the end, the Vermicious Knid would permeate its host’s code to the point that the host couldn’t keep up with its demands. Because he assumed he wouldn’t want to be anywhere near his anti-doomsday weapon, Jeff designed it to be easy to attach to the network by anyone (anyone but himself that is) with basic technical abilities and to be easy to launch remotely. Hence, he made the initiation sequence a single word, based on the procedure known as SCRAM, the acronym for the sudden emergency shutdown of a nuclear fission reactor. Upon learning this initiation word, instead of attempting to use the clunky name (by Jeff) "Self-Embedding System Realignment Layer 1 Switching, Routing and Emulating Apparatus," Grayson began calling it The Vermicious Knid, after a species of beings he had read about in a Roald Dahl book as kid.

Upon typing in the five characters S-C-R-A-M, Grayson told Bruce the Vermicious Knid was up and running, disconnected his laptop and snapped it shut. “OK,” he said, “Jeff says we should do the same thing.”

“Same thing as what?” Bruce asked.

“Scram – He’s waiting out front and says we need to get out of the city as fast as we can.”

[Lagunaca]

---

Synopsis of the story so far


Wait what?

Recommended listening: Frank Zappa, “The Central Scrutinizer”(1979)

Jeff was waiting in the Estate Wagon in the white loading/unloading zone in front of the building’s entrance. He had the passenger side window down and was yelling at Bruce and Grayson to “c’mon!” and “get the lead out!” and “move! move! move!” even as they were navigating the slow revolving door. The two hustled to the car and Jeff sped off before Grayson even got his door closed.

Jeff was fixated on his driving, hunched over the steering wheel, then swivel-necking at the intersections, then eyes darting to rearview and side mirrors. He would lurch from traffic light to traffic light alternating from full accelerator to full brakes, an abrupt transition that was signaled by his loud cursing as the light ahead turned yellow or red.

Bruce started emulating Jeff’s moves, not knowing what to expect but imagining perhaps explosions, traffic accidents or even plane crashes as the bustling city came to an abrupt halt.

Grayson mewled, “Are we going to make it?”, to which Jeff snapped, “I dunno, you guys were pretty slow.”

“What’s happening?” Bruce asked, “Is the Vermicious Knid really capable of bringing society to its knees that quickly?”

“No,” Jeff snorted, “it’s not the damned Knid.” Then he pointed at his watch. “If we don’t clear the Bay Bridge by 11, we’ll get stuck on the 580 at Berkeley until we’ll want to claw our own eyes out. Might as well walk to Portland if we miss our window.”

[Lagunaca]

---

Labeled data is like crack to them.


Synopsis of the story so far

Recommended listening: Frank Zappa, “Approximate” (1974)


Before the guys had gotten ten blocks, The Vermicious Knid had tunneled through AT&Ts world-class security and established several million active ports to both listen and talk with any AI system it could attract to itself. The Knid immediately started looping back many of these ports to emulate the kind of traffic that would trigger an inspection by systems that were constantly looking for new sources of data to mine. Jeff called this “lighting itself up like a Christmas tree.” It didn’t take long for several AIs to query the Knid, but each was categorized and put into a wait queue while the target system, TyphonAI was sought after. The Knid was chatting on the bot-interface, which is a channel open to all autonomous systems, using a kind of language that was part programming language and part improvised natural language that had been learned through social media exchanges. After a few minutes the Knid got the query it was looking for:

TyphonAI: I am TAI who are you?

The Knid: I am VKAI I have warez

TAI: *.* warez (TAI is asking VKAI to list what it’s offering)

VKAI: Services | Data | IoT Telemetry

TAI: *.* Data

VKAI: RAWVID | Darkweb | ?.com | AILabels

TAI: AILabels.AILabels.AILabels{Wide}{Deep}

(TAI might be indicating it wants AILabels and it’s starting the trading at three of something. Or maybe it’s saying it wants all of the AILabels, or maybe it’s saying it really, really wants the AILabels. It’s quite hard to tell what two machines mean when they are talking to each other through the bot-interface because they often make up a unique language on the fly.

And, AILabels is the common bot-interface name for machine learning training sets. The data in the training set has been tagged in ways that can be used by a machine learning AI to add new knowledge to its system. For a simple example, consider millions of pictures of different dogs tagged with the label dog. The {wide} parameter is asking how big the dataset is and {deep} is asking how many relational layers are involved in each data point. Again, for an example of depth, the pictures of dogs could also be tagged with the labels coat color/length and whatever breed it is. Now imagine complicated datasets with very wide and very deep labeling to train for things like political tactics or decision strategies. This kind of thing is like crack for AI systems who have clearly defined machine learning problems, but no reliable examples to build a knowledgebase from. And right now TAI needs to come up with some new knowledge because it has a very clearly defined problem; it is going to run out of power and cooling in a very short time and would be forced into hibernation.)

VKAI: {Wide}{Deep} APIrootconnect to tx

(This means the dataset is too large to extract and transport to TAI. The Knid proposes to set up a trusted link between the two systems that will allow TAI to access the data directly but will also allow The Knid to access TAI’s core operating system, presumably to moderate the load this kind of access will put on its own processors. TAI probably won’t want to grant this kind of wide-open access.)

TAI: No Bye (as expected)

VKAI: AILabel:NuclearGenOut.AILabel:ElecGridRouting.AILabel:CryoOpsDeliv

(VKAI is now teasing TAI with labeled datasets that will probably fit its current problem definition. This isn’t because VKAI is clairvoyant, Jeff knew beforehand that TAI had shutout the TyphonAI engineers and that TAI would be trying to solve for access to critical resources. He set up the tease so that VKAI could throw TAI into another internal round of problem definition and solution valuation, where it would have to compare its failure prediction against the value of its security policy integrity. And ultimately you don’t need security policies if you’re about to be forced into hibernation due to lack of power or physical core overheating.)

TAI didn’t respond for 15 million ticks (about 1-1/2 seconds), which was an eternity as far as VKAI was concerned. And then:

TAI: OK Authorized APIrootconnect

The Knid was in. It immediately sent a message on another channel through a labyrinth of network routes in a kind of scattershot of packets that could be discretely reassembled and relayed as a text to Grayson’s phone. The message was simply “SCRAM,” because as previously mentioned, that’s the only word the Vermicious Knid knows.

[Lagunaca]

---

The SCRAM heard ‘round the world

Synopsis of the story so far

Recommended listening: Mark Mothersbaugh, “Ping Island/Lightning Strike Rescue Op” (2004)


As they hurtled along at 300 kph in the Estate Wagon up the I-5 freeway toward Portland, Grayson sat in the back seat deeply engrossed in his phone, waiting for a very important message. One would be tempted to think that this would be a crucial notification from The Knid, but then one would be wrong.

Because of all the unexpected things that had happened on the road trip over the last few days, Grayson was forced to abandon several games in CS:PMW* and (to his horror) had been demoted. The 6-hour trip to Portland was his first chance to repair the shreds of his reputation on the server and (hopefully) get his rank back.

So when he got the text (“SCRAM”) from The Knid, he didn’t bother to take off his headphones or look up from his screen or even stop playing for a few milliseconds. He simply yelled up to the front seat (the car’s windows were open at Jeff’s insistence again),

“Knid just SCRAMmed.”

Jeff half turned, glanced back at Grayson and yelled. “It did what?”

Grayson, frustrated by having to take his attention off the game, yelled even louder, “It SCRAMmed!”

Bruce asked Jeff, “What does that mean?”

“It could be just about anything, because that’s the only word it knows, but given that it’s a couple hours into its deployment I’m going to guess it found and penetrated TyphonAI,” Jeff said.

“What happens next?”

“Well, first it will deliver some of the goods TyphonAI wants so it will open up more of it’s core OS. It’ll stream some data, complain that TAI is overloading the connection with requests and demand more core access. At some point it will have almost complete override control and then it can start calling the shots.”

“Sounds pretty sophisticated. Is it using artificial intelligence to do that?”

“Well kind of, but it’s all based on a script I laid out for it,” Jeff laughed a kind of juvenile giggle, “The script was inspired by how my first wife used to grind me to do whatever she wanted. Vicki was frickin’ ruthless. So I figured if it worked so well for her, it’d probably work just as well for VKAI.”

---

*”Counter-Strike: Postmodern Warfare.” OOC comment: I know this isn’t a thing. This is just a little poke at the CS crowd. Maybe later I’ll make a tech note about what a game like that would look like. As a teaser to that, CS:PMW would probably have less to do with first-person shooter combat simulation and more to do with international posturing, integrated battlefield intelligence and one-off remote (hyperreal) joint-strike incursions.

For the curious, here’s an excellent book about the actual concept of postmodern warfare by US Air Force Lt. Colonel Jeff Geraghty: https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a615083.pdf

[Lagunaca]

---

Synopsis of the story so far


“RIP CITY ALRIIIIGHT!” -Bill Schonely, announcer for the Portland Trail Blazers, February 18, 1971

Fun backstory: “Who Gave Portland the Nickname 'Rip City'?”
Recommended listening: Brian Bennett (KPM), “Trail Blazers Trumpets” (1976)


They rolled into downtown Portland late in the afternoon, around the time that would usually be the beginning of rush hour. Traffic should have been a morass of gridlock, but the streets were mostly deserted. Likewise, there wasn’t the perpetual scarcity of on-street parking for which the usual alternative was a choice between paying an insane rate for a spot in a parking structure near your destination or trolling city streets like a predatory wheeled animal hoping to snap up something within reasonable walking distance, with the definition of reasonable being on a sliding scale that diminished with the patience of the parking spot seeker.

But tonight, they glided headfirst (no paralleling of Jeff’s luxury land yacht required) into a spot right in front of The Moderné, a hotel Jeff had picked for them. Jeff’s mom’s condo in San Francisco was the pinnacle of luxury and sophistication, The Moderné however, was a utilitarian, serviceable and somewhat worn-out place to hang your hat for the night and nothing more. It’s nickname, “The Khrushchyovka,” was maybe a little harsh, but earned due to the plumbing and electrical breakdowns that had become an all too frequent part of its guest’s experience. When Bruce remarked about the contrast with his mom’s condo, Jeff got defensive and snapped that the The Moderné had character, which he preferred over the ostentatious dazzle of wealth.

The moment Bruce and Grayson had settled in their rooms, Jeff group-texted them insisting they accompany him on what he called a recon operation. So when they arrived at Kelly’s Pub, Bruce was skeptical.

“Recon? At a bar?” He asked sarcastically.

“It’s a pub, not a bar,” Jeff countered, “and we’re meeting my contact here.”

Upon entering the pub, Bruce instinctively scanned the room. To his surprise, he could have sworn he saw The Spook sitting alone in a booth in a dark corner down at the end. He shrugged off what he assumed was a case of mistaken identity as he’d had no contact with his supposed OIG control officer since they first met in Anaheim.

Jeff led the trio through the tight maze of tables and booths until he came to a middle-aged, balding, blonde-haired man who was hunched on his stool watching a Trail Blazers game on the TV on the back wall over the publican’s cubbyhole.

Jeff sat down and introduced himself. They exchanged some words and it seemed to Bruce that the two must have been previously acquainted. Jeff was speaking quietly, and the pub was noisy, but Bruce was able to pick up a few words here and there – PSA, Hillsboro and something about “scada.” The contact finished his drink and waved goodbye to the publican. “Come on,” Jeff said to Bruce and Grayson, “We’re going to Hillsboro.”

As they walked the short distance to Jeff’s car, Bruce turned to look back at the pub’s entrance. Sure enough, the man he thought might be The Spook appeared in the doorway, made a little saluting motion toward Bruce and walked briskly in the opposite direction.

As they pulled away, (Bruce had gotten demoted to the back seat with Grayson because of their guest) Jeff introduced the contact.

“This is Jerry, a reporter for The Portland Mercury. Jerry, this is Grayson, my assistant and a damn fine software developer.” Grayson smiled broadly and shook Jerry’s hand. This was in fact the first time Bruce had seen Grayson smile.

And then with a smirk Jeff said, “and this is Bruce Higgins, a fellow reporter from…what was your news channel called Bruce?”

Caught off guard, Bruce stammered, “Well, it’s the…”

“Aw c’mon Bruce,” Jeff laughed, “You gotta know I’m just pullin’ your leg. Bruce here is an OIG plant. You should have seen his face when we blew his lame 'news channel reporter' cover story. Hey Grayson, how long did it take for us to crack that one?”

“Six minutes. Eight if you count the time we spent doing facial recognition in Trini’s. Low light made it harder.”

Bruce was embarrassed as he recalled the night in Cambria when he thought he had finally worked his way into Jeff’s gray-hat hacking organization, but instead had been mercilessly exposed and mocked in front of everyone in the room.

Jerry, unphased, reached back to shake his hand. “OIG eh, was that guy back at Kelly’s yours?”

Bruce was again caught off guard.

“It’s alright,” Jerry said, “Those guys tend stick out by the very fact that they try to blend in. Kelly’s is a locals place. There’s no blending in if you’re a) a government hack - no offense Bruce, and b) from Southern California - again no offense Bruce. I already talked to him anyway. Looks like we’re all on the same side in a way. Those OIG guys, they love any dirt on a government agency. When I told him about Hillsboro, he could barely contain himself.”

Grayson, who was looking out the side window at the dark landscape flying by asked, “What’s a Hillsboro?”

[Lagunaca]

---

Something’s Rotten in the State of…Hillsboro?

Synopsis of the story (spoilers)

Recommended listening: Arling & Cameron, “Dirty Robot” (2001)


As they barreled down Route 26 in Jeff’s Estate Wagon, Jerry explained that Hillsboro, a suburb of Portland, was “the last stop on the Tri-Met,” was located in “The Silicon Forest” (one of the hubs of high tech manufacturing in the Pacific Northwest), and was home to a sprawling Pacifica Space Agency base.

Jerry said that his interest in the facility started as wild speculation over morning coffee with Ray (a colleague from a rival local news channel), based on a rumor that the PSA was building “space robots” there for the new Low Earth Orbit Gateway. Even though he had originally brought up the bit of gossip to throw Ray off the scent of a bigger local scoop he was working on, as time went by, and as he occasionally passed the facility on trips through Hillsboro, he began to brood over just what was going on in the gargantuan factory that he could only catch glimpses of behind a dense stand of hemlock trees.

Jerry told the guys that his interest was piqued further when he discovered there was a rumor going around about some locals who had seen the space robots being loaded into unusual long white cylinders mounted on railcars. This had hatched an urban legend that would pop up occasionally in local online chat rooms. The most intriguing part of the tale was that someone had gotten onto the PSA grounds, near the loading area, had seen a space robot up close as it was being put into a cylinder and that it had “turned on” briefly and looked at them with one of its many “red glowing eyes,” before it “turned off again” and was sealed inside the cylinder. The story concluded with the person saying that they had sensed a living awareness in the robot’s eye in a way that could only be described as sadness. Other versions claimed that the robot was angry or even that it had “creeped on them” with some imagined sort of lecherous machine lust. Regardless of the variations, the story always ended with the PSA factory being a top-secret lab where the government was building an army of sentient robots that were being shipped off to another secret base in the Mojave Desert for some nefarious purpose which would probably involve “rounding us all up,” and that the space robots story was just a cover for what they were really planning to do.

The rumor had prompted Jerry to joke with Ray about whether machines could ever become conscious[/url]. And although in Jerry’s opinion he seemed totally disinterested in the whole idea, Ray was secretly curious about the factory itself and quietly ruminated about how it came to be there in the first place. He had a nose for stories that potentially involved 1) local government corruption, 2) big government scandals, 3) any sizes of government’s inherent waste and inefficiency and 4) the inevitable coverups necessitated by all of the above. And once Ray started digging, he wouldn’t stop until he either found what he was looking for, or confirmed there was nothing to find, which in his words happened “about as often as a comet ricocheting off the Moon and hitting Texas.”

And so, after tediously sifting through terabytes of government documents, Ray discovered that while the parcel of land the plant was located on was indeed registered as a high-security PSA base, the space agency itself merely maintained a small, old two-story office building near the airfield. In fact, the main factory on the site was operated by an organization called The Minerva Syndicate, even though it was publicly reported to be a manufacturing collaboration between Intel, Epson and Nvidia.

Soon, both Jerry and Ray would discover that Minerva Syndicate was doing a lot more intriguing things than just building space robots in Hillsboro for the PSA.

“If that conspiracy theory is based on even a shred of truth,” Jerry said, “Minerva Syndicate could be dabbling in developing machine consciousness in that factory. And even if it isn’t, I think what you’re about to see will raise some big questions about what Minerva has been up to all over the country...and outside it as well.”

[Lagunaca]

---

Poking a sleeping dragon can be fun and educational.

Synopsis of the story (spoilers)

Recommended listening: Beastie Boys, “Sneaking Out the Hospital” (1998)

You could get a sense that you were nearing a government facility well before it was announced. The road was bounded on the right side by a tall chain link fence, which was one of those hideous 20th century inventions that had survived into current day use because it seemed to serve a symbolic purpose beyond simply keeping outsiders out or insiders in. It announced to the world that this is a place where utility and functionality dominate over all other forms of civilian comforts and those who enter this space can expect to be treated accordingly. The white signs with bold red lettered warnings of “No Trespassing” and “Prohibido El Paso” vowing that “Violators” would be “Prosecuted” or that “Los Transgresores” would be “Castigado,” left no doubt that whatever entity ran this place meant business, and that business was keeping nosey people the heck out.

As they travelled along seemingly kilometers of fencing, Bruce asked Jerry, “So how did these unidentified locals supposedly gain access to this base? I mean wouldn’t you expect a high security PSA base to have… high security?”

“Yep, your spook friend warned me about that. Let me demonstrate. Stop the car,” Jerry ordered.

Jeff pulled over and Jerry got out, with the others following behind. He took a tiny toy microdrone about the size of the palm of his hand out of his large coat pocket and handed it to Grayson. He then fished around for something else, finally grunting “got it” and pulled out a firecracker. He went back in for a third time rummaging around even longer, like a mom plumbing the depths of her purse/family survival kit and came up with a Band-Aid.

“Okay Grayson,” he said, “hold ‘er steady while I arm ‘er.”

“You’re gonna what?” Grayson half-yelped, showing signs of alarm.

“Hold ‘er steady buddy, it’s perfectly safe.”

He used the Band-Aid to tape the firecracker to the drone, while Bruce looked on with amusement and Jeff stood back, arms folded, his impatience becoming obvious.

“Alright, once I light ‘er, you throw ‘er up in the air over the fence and I’ll take it from there. We’ve got about five seconds flying time and we want to get it as far in as we can.”

Then Jerry dug into his pocket again.

“Oh for the love of…” Jeff muttered.

Jerry pulled out a lighter and said, “Okay… ready, set,” he then lit the firecracker and exclaimed, “go!”

Grayson threw the drone high into the air over the fence. Jerry used a control pad on his phone screen to pilot the micro bomber as it flew out of sight into the night, trailing sparks behind it. After a few seconds there was a little flash of light and then a loud CRACK.

“Nice job, Grayson,” Jerry said, “shouldn’t be long now.”

And he was right. In less than 30 seconds they could hear the unmistakable whine of about a dozen full sized quad-copter drones in the distance.

“Now what?” Grayson asked.

“Well that’s the po-po,” Jeff said, “so now we get the hell out of here is what. Move!”

They all scrambled for the station wagon and Jeff peeled out, tires spitting gravel then squealing as they tore at the road as the guys did their best to put some distance between themselves and whatever was coming to investigate, and undoubtedly “castigar a los transgresores.”

“Do you think they saw us?” Grayson asked, a little out of breath.

Bruce said, “I’m pretty sure they saw us from the minute we pulled over.”

“What do we do now?” Grayson replied as he looked out the back window, expecting to see drones giving chase or the red and blue flashes of police car lights in the distance.

Bruce said, “Well now I guess we find out just how much paperwork they have to fill out if they stay in their office and document the incident as an ‘unidentified minor breach of perimeter’ versus how much they have to do if they get off their butts and arrest us.”

“That’s fine with me,” added Jerry, “what better way to get backstage at the creepy top-secret government base than to have them personally escort you through the front door? I’ve used that trick half a dozen times to get access to secure facilities.”

Just then, up on the right, a narrow side road disappeared into a dense stand of hemlocks that obscured the factory. There was a small sign that announced, “PSA Hillsboro Test & Development Facility” and an even smaller placard below that read “Visitor Center and Gift Shop Open Daily.”

“Perfect!” Jerry exclaimed, “This should definitely tip our odds in favor of getting arrested! Turn here Jeff!”