Quantum rapture, p.1
Quantum Rapture, page 1
Contents
Dedication
Chapter One - Hardy's Hand
Chapter Two - Julian and Hardy
Chapter Three - Archie and Nora
Chapter Four - Hardy's Garage
Chapter Five - Quan and Yang
Chapter Six - Lockheed
Chapter Seven - Hardy Sees Quan
Chapter Eight - Shopping List
Chapter Nine - Atlas Born
Chapter Ten - The Empath
Chapter Eleven - Pi
Chapter Twelve - School Bus
Chapter Thirteen - Lyra Vega
Chapter Fourteen - Dry Love
Chapter Fifteen - Empty-handed
Chapter Sixteen - Titleist 1
Chapter Seventeen - Styx and Bones
Chapter Eighteen - Lost
Chapter Nineteen - Atlas Hung
Chapter Twenty - Whale Cries
Chapter Twenty-One - Devil on Campus
Chapter Twenty-Two - Frog Legs
Chapter Twenty-Three - The Ark of the Covenant
Chapter Twenty-Four - Quan Bytes
Chapter Twenty-Five - Lyra's Ashes
Chapter Twenty-Six - Oil Platform
Chapter Twenty-Seven - Tromboning for Whales
Chapter Twenty-Eight - South of Argentina
Chapter Twenty-Nine - The Machine
Chapter Thirty - Quantum Rapture
Chapter Thirty-One - The Pit
Chapter Thirty-Two - The Magi
Chapter Thirty-Three - The Tower
Acknowledgements
Dedicated to
Everett O’Neal
He showed me the world one cathedral at a time. No one has done more to teach me the power of a voice.
CHAPTER ONE
Hardy's Hand
A GRIMOIRE IS a book of magic. Hardy’s grimoire was written in the computer language of Perl. Every operating system has a Perl interpreter somewhere in its crevices. This made Hardy a very portable magician. Every program is someone’s will echoed in their incantation. Computer spells take on a life of their own. They are granted consciousness by the central processor between every clock cycle. They have a finite life to do what they can with what they are given. These spells are daemons or ghosts in the machine. Daemons have urges and long for priority over a computer’s resources. Hardy’s daemons have been thriving across the internet for twelve years now. He has no way of tracking these children. To do so would compromise their hiding place. Hardy codes in packets that yearn to survive in the loops of bounced mail autoresponders. Hardy’s code hides in the bureaucracy of javascript routines embedded in a corporate site's privacy policy page. No one scrutinizes the words of lawyers – making them the perfect place to hide. Like any virus, a daemon’s life is about survival.
But Hardy wasn’t content writing daemons. He wanted full-immersion into the digital frontier. He found the QWERTY keyboard a poor interface for his spell-craft. As a software engineer, Hardy’s entire life was spent on a keyboard. Hardy wanted more from the experience. He wanted to merge with his machine. He dove into robotics with a quest for a better, faster interface. His first experiments involved rewiring a stenographer’s machine: the fastest court reporters record three-hundred-and-sixty words per minute. The fastest typists around one-hundred-and-fifty. But Hardy’s code writing required lots of special characters and punctuation. After a few years of tinkering, Hardy dismissed keyboards and scripted languages completely.
Before implants, Hardy was using data gloves. His rig evolved over the years. The early version had three flex sensors on each finger measuring the bend in each knuckle. The gloves ran off a three-volt power supply and a micro-controller the size of a dime. Hardy sewed wires into a long sleeve shirt with a pocket for a rechargeable battery. His hand fit into the thin exoskeleton of rubberized acetate with etched silver conductive foil. The gloves plugged into his shirt, the shirt plugged into the battery. The system was as sleek as he could make it but still cumbersome. The lateral movements of his thumb weren’t tracking as fast as he needed and the flex sensors kept failing.
When Hardy saw his first 3D biological printer, he quickly developed an addiction for bio-hacking. The desire to enhance one’s body is spurred by a belief in its flaws. Hardy focused on his body’s flaws. He turned his obsession with weakness into a fetish for bionics.
He plunged the injector into the crease between his thumb and finger. There was practically no bleeding here. It was weird to stab yourself and see nothing come out. Hardy’s nervous system stopped flinching years ago, after his body normalized the violations. Like the diabetic who pricks himself ten-thousand times, the experience changes you. The body’s slate is never reset. Instead, the pain dulls – which fuels dissociation. After a while, the flow of cortisol lacks the enthusiasm of adrenaline and the body stops caring what’s done to it. He emptied the plunger beneath the fascia. It pooled up over his abductor pollicis. Hardy hoped this recipe would yield a steady electrical resistance when the thumb was curled. If so, he could track all of the fingers and thumb with a single implant directly in the center of his palm.
Hardy pondered the self-induced stigmata and wondered if it was wrong. He would never have to find out, though. The new gel in his thumb had failed to produce a consistent signal. For six months, Hardy could barely move his hand. He felt the shame of self-mutilation every time the pain broke his focus. The loss would prove to be a breakthrough when Hardy finally abandoned his attempts to track any flexing of fingers. He would digitize the digits of each finger and create a simple interface with each finger, instead.
Math uses a decimal system divisible by ten. We find it easy to track this with our fingers and toes. Computers find it easier to track hexadecimal numbers. Instead of tens, hexadecimal is divisible by sixteen. Hardy decided he could teach his hands to speak this hexadecimal language of the computer. Each finger would express one bit of information. If a finger was pressed, its value is one, if unpressed, its value is zero. With this system, one hand can express four bits on four fingers. Two hands can express one whole byte on eight fingers. Hardy could speak hexadecimal by pressing and releasing all of his fingers on both hands. It was as if his fingers were made to type in hexadecimal. Hardy’s thumbs served as a clutch letting the sensors know when it should either read or ignore input from his fingers. This new system required Hardy to think in hexadecimal. Once he mastered that task, he was speaking fluent Unicode in weeks. Unicode allowed Hardy to sign any letter from any alphabet in any language using his hands. The internet standard for color utilizes three sets of hexadecimal numbers to express up to sixteen million colors. Hardy could type any color with just three presses of his hands.
Within a year, Hardy was walking through the city pressing his fingers into a thin metal plate strapped to his thigh like a gunslinger. He could type up to three-hundred words-per-minute with perfect accuracy. His fingers didn’t need his eyes to find a keyboard. They only needed to add or remove his touch against a metal plate. Eventually, Hardy would tattoo his fingers and thumbs with dielectric ink giving each digit a unique signature.
CHAPTER TWO
Julian and Hardy
JULIAN FELT JAZZ in his blood as he escorted himself across the deep red carpet to the front of the stage. Hardy was there, hounding an executive about his soon-to-market Virtual Reality (VR) headset. “Listen to me. It needs eye detection. Two internal cameras, to track eye position and measure pupil dilation.” Hardy continued, “The nervous system is your joystick.” Hardy could see the man not listening. Julian was, though, and nodded to Hardy in approval. In the distraction, the presenter’s attention was sniped by the glow of drooling fanboys. Hardy felt the dismissal like a punch in the chest. He had come a long way to tell him that.
Julian asked Hardy if he was in the hardware industry but Hardy was already slouching, “No. I’m in software. But one could access the nervous system directly with the vagus nerve.” Julian was intrigued, “A limbic interface? Fascinating.” Hardy was already out the door and under the cold, clear sky. His lungs felt liberated from the building.
He took himself for a walk along the pier as he clenched the fist of his right hand. His thumb would still turn numb in stress. He could feel his adrenaline percolating. Hardy found the experience of interfacing with people akin to a million electric eels squirming through his bloodstream. The experience made him lurch.
Across the water, the snow-tipped mountains of Vancouver poured themselves into the harbor like clumps of brown sugar. To the west, bright-colored seaplanes glided their way down through the clouds to split the water’s smooth surface like a knife. Hardy leaned out from the edge of the railing to regain his center. The cold-spiked rain beat his face with its frozen bristles. As Hardy bowed his head, a bald eagle banked below the pier outmaneuvering a gang of nagging seagulls. Hardy knew then: this wasn’t the place for the regal.
Hardy unpacked himself into a restaurant booth nearby. He looked up just in time to see Julian and motioned an invitation with his arm. Hardy was surprised by his hospitality. By the time dinner was over the two men were chest-deep in plans of a warehouse supercluster joined with a quantum processor.
Julian sketched a ring of eight squares divided into an octagon. This was a clustered supercomputer Julian called Yang. Yang functioned as a repository of information used for artificial intelligence training. In the center of Yang’s circle, Julian drew a tiny black cube and planted his finger like a flag, “This is the quantum processor. Or it will be. We’re still speculating on the interfac
Julian looked up, “This is all new ground. Both systems have different needs. The quantum processor operates at near absolute zero so the challenge is keeping her cold. Yang requires a large amount of steady electrical power to stay hot. Eight banks, in the same building, each with sixty-four rows of appliances is a huge drain.”
Julian’s machine would be a womb for artificial intelligence. Making AI was a process of on-the-job training. The amount of time and focus spent on nurturing and training a system determines its accuracy. It takes tens-of-millions of tests to adequately train an AI to detect a corner in an image. These skills can be stacked to attain other abilities like facial detection or even spatial tracking on a room. A child will spend years learning how to hold a pencil before they can begin to write.
Julian pulled out his business card and handed it to Hardy, “So. You want in?” Hardy stuttered, “In? With what? Wait? This was real?” Julian loaded a smile, “Yang came online three years ago. I run the projects department at Duke. We’ve been brainstorming how to add a quantum processor to the network. Your idea of a limbic interface sounds interesting. I think it could bring some much-needed attention. I know someone who would get a kick out of this idea. It could help both of us.” Hardy’s eyes were on the mascot in Julian’s business card. A blue devil holding a trident was smirking when Hardy accepted the offer, “I’m in.”
CHAPTER THREE
Archie and Nora
ARCHIE AND NORA McKay were in their 60’s when they purchased their elegant Tudor-style home in the gated island community of Hilton Head. Archie found the house online and insisted it was a bargain. He declared it a wedding present from Nora’s inheritance. Archie met Nora when he disclosed her father’s will. Nora’s money was older than she was and the family trust kept most of it out of Archie’s reach. Funds from the trust were to be used for the “betterment of humanity through advancements in mental health.”
This stipulation wasn’t a problem for Archie, the lawyer. Both Nora and the funds were pliable with the right fingers. Archie loved Nora because Nora made him feel powerful. Nora spent her younger life in New York as a trophy. Her days of ballet in the company were over and her spirit had long deteriorated from the lack of limelight. She was an easy rudder for Archie to steer.
Their new house was perched on a round-a-bout at the end of the fifteenth hole – a par three with a long water hazard. A spunky bleached realtor read the concern in Nora’s eyes and reassured her that all of the glass was bulletproof. Nora wasn’t sure that was a perk. The couple signed the papers. Neither of them played golf. When Nora found out there were alligators in the canal, she stopped going outside completely.
Archie was a lawyer by convenience and entrepreneur by passion. He was far too wealthy to be called a confidence man. He was a white-collar fact technician. A retired golf community was the perfect place for him to hunt.
Hardy and Julian had the pleasure of being Archie and Nora’s first dinner guests in their new home. Four limp noodles coated in white sauce flapped their arms in a bon-voyage as they disappeared inside Archie’s lips, “The industry of psychology is shame-rustling. I can make some feel better by making them feel bad for not feeling good. It’s a game of biting ankles.”
Archie and Julian were going to revolutionize the self-help industry with an artificial intelligence guru. Archie had confidence in Nora. Julian had confidence in Archie. Archie needed confidence in Hardy. Hardy explained his theory for a new interface connecting directly to the vagus nerve. Archie listened intently as Hardy explained how his interface bypasses the neocortex, “It’s like getting a clean signal directly from your mammalian brain without the distractions of reason.” Julian was right. Archie was motivated.
CHAPTER FOUR
Hardy's Garage
HARDY ACCEPTED THE job at Duke University as a lexical search architect in Julian’s department. He was the company’s only academic heathen with no advanced degrees for legitimacy. He rented a decommissioned gas station to call home. Hardy didn’t do well in apartments with all of his tinkerings. In his garage, he could make noise twenty-four-hours a day. He turned the old stockroom behind the counter into a bedroom. With the addition of a curtain, the mop room between restrooms was converted into a walk-in shower. He kept a sportscoat, three ties, and slacks hung on two hangers in one of the stalls in the bathroom and declared it his closet.
Hardy spent most of his time at the station working on his interface in the garage. The old oil changing bay was his laboratory and he was his own Frankenstein. He wanted to go deeper. His new salary helped him experiment. His latest body modification installed metallic threads in the rims of his earlobes and the bridge of his nose. Hardy wanted an AV visor that mounted to his face magnetically.
At Duke, Hardy had access to their biological printer and twenty percent of Yang’s runtime environment, three days per week, from midnight to four. No one there embraced Hardy’s enthusiasm for augmented body modification. In fact, they gave him looks. He kept this work to himself as much as possible and felt the angst of having to lie to people about what he was printing. Yang’s supercluster of graphene processors gave Hardy abilities most programmers would never have. Everyone on Julian’s team took their console time with Yang seriously. Hardy would run mock sessions on Yang’s emulators to optimize his time at its keyboards. Time with Yang was a privilege in high demand. Hardy would do whatever he could to keep it.
The Game of Life Rules
For a space that is full:
Each cell with one or no neighbors dies by solitude.
Each cell with four or more neighbors dies by overpopulation.
Each cell with two or three neighbors survives.
For a space that is empty:
Each cell with three neighbors becomes populated.
The Game of Life is a cellular automaton simulator developed by Cambridge mathematician John Conway. It’s played on a grid where each square can be assigned a death or a birth. The rules of the game make the grid’s population appear unpredictable. Every round of the game, each square is fated a birth or death based on the population of its neighbors. The game begins by seeding the grid with an initial population of squares. When the program launches, a chain reaction unrolls the board’s fate through time. The game ends when all of the squares are dead. Conway’s rules are designed to mimic the laws of nature. This process could last thirteen rounds, or it could take twenty-thousand.
Hardy had used Conway’s game in his work as a way to quickly build and mutate experimental artificial intelligence. He programmed thousands of virtual armies to see which ones survived the longest. Hardy would program daemons on his computer to play the game by generating their seeds and playing them out on the board. Hardy would monitor the winning patterns from his army of daemons and collect their notes.
One of them, the Quan, had now survived the game for eleven years and counting. Her seed somehow remained alive day-after-day when thousands of others would die. It was as if the Quan had discovered an algorithm for survival.
Quan had survived the Game of Life 20,829,312,000 cycles and counting. Her seed could die at any moment. It was an emotional experience for Hardy to wake up and find her still alive. He admired her running as she blinked on his phone. He would stare into her pulsing grid like it was a campfire.
He wondered what made her program so special. He couldn’t see Quan’s source code to find out. Its solution is woven into its neural net in billions of microscopic pieces. Even if Quan could speak, she couldn’t tell Hardy how she survived so long. It would be like Hardy telling Quan how he makes his heartbeat. Talents like survival are built into our code at birth.
Hardy spent years trying to recreate Quan a second time. He reviewed every keystroke from his computer when Quan was created. He went so far as to trace his kernel’s random number generator seed. Still, nothing he replicated or resurrected survived like Quan’s build. She was an enigma emerged from the abyss by a few lines of code from a daemon.
