by G M Steenrod
“Alfie, go to manual off.”
“You will need to reactivate me at your console, Madam.”
“Yes, continue, please.”
A brief notice flashed on the screen wall that Alfie was now off.
“Thank you, Baby,” said Ada. “I see you were looking for something regarding new glyphs.”
Ada smiled at Cassie. The software was very good at facial emotes, but Ada's expression had a depth that exceeded the simulation. Ada had programmed additional responses for Cassie. Cassie smiled both in response to Ada's image and the additional care that had gone into the preparation.
“I had hoped you would head in this direction,” Ada continued. “What I was working on was a deeper type of glyph that had more than emotional affect coded into it. I know, it sounds crazy, and it has implications about the structure of the universe itself.”
Cassie was fully fixed on her mother. Normally, the software was designed to prompt interaction, but there was a conspiratorial tone to her mother's software and Ada's monologue contributed to the feeling.
“Believe it or not, it all started with a conversation with Mom and Dad—your grandparents. That's actually how I got the original concept of the glyph. Your grandfather felt that humanity had reached a crux based around symbol systems. So did Mom.”
“It wasn't hieroglyphs?” Cassie asked.
“No, that was a smokescreen to protect the privacy of my parents.”
“Ahhh.” Even as a child, Cassie had been pestered by inquiring minds trying to get some clue to her mother's latest work. If any knowledge about her grandparents being the source of the concept was to become public, they would have been hounded by the media.
“Mom, what was the crux?”
Ada smiled. They were starting to jibe. When Ada was present, she and Cassie achieved moments of almost magical synchronization. Even with just the image of Ada, it had started.
“Early in human development, humans assigned nearly magical importance to the first symbols. Some of those early symbols I would later turn into the glyphs. The magic of the early symbols came from a stack composed of mythology and ritual associated with the symbol.”
“Of course!” Cassie said. That was the reason that hieroglyphs were such an easy target for outside commentators. They had many features that Ada spoke of.
“As language became more technical, the stack information decayed. The magic of the symbols was lost. Your grandparents both believed that many of the world's problems came from this disassociation, but that we were in a time of restoration.”
“The restoration of magic?” Cassie asked incredulously, quickly putting together the implication of her mother’s words.
“Well…the restoration of what was once called magic. Really, it’s the return of symbolic power. In many ways, they were right, if you look at what has already happened.”
Cassie was momentarily speechless. She had always thought that it was a privilege to be able to move others with her creations. Her ability to synthesize realities had her nicknamed as a “Creator Goddess” on the Ether. Her fans on the two worlds had spread the name vigorously, before shortening it to CG.
This was different though. This was something that was magical from history. The use of those magical features in technology. It was different, Cassie could feel it.
“Cassie, I've encoded the rest of my notes and logs here. You should know, it's mostly my thought experiments. I came to a lot of dead ends, but you can see what I was thinking. I did manage to create the emotive glyph, but that was only intended to be the first step. The design of the emotive is in the logs you've already viewed. So, there is nothing new on that topic. The emotive was easy after doing all this other work.”
“Okay, Mom. I'll start looking through them.”
“Baby, this is the sensitive part. I am going to bypass the normal emotional control filters so that I can talk to you directly.”
“Really?” Cassie asked. Her mother was a gifted programmer, and sometimes the extent of her mother's technical command surprised her. The bypass that Ada had coded into Cassie's quantum was at the OS level, far beyond what Cassie believed could be done by anyone.
“When you were 17, I disappeared,” Ada said, “I encoded this module into the logs when you were 9. It's not been active since then. It's scraping the knowledge from your quantum during the diagnostic, so I can be relevant to this time.”
Cassie nodded. Normally, the software wouldn't raise the issue of her mother's disappearance. It was deemed too sensitive of an emotional topic, and could trigger her,
“I suspected that I might disappear or die in a mysterious way. My ship went missing, I am presumed dead.”
Cassie twinged slightly, as she always did now, when encountering the topic of her mother's death. It was a far better response than when she was younger. Her mother had hired a private ship to take her to Mars for business. Ada, 17 at the time, had looked forward to being “independent” while her mother was gone. The ship missed its check ins. No wreckage was found.
There was the possibility of pirates or even retribution for her husband, Patrido's military action. An elaborate investigation was conducted. Nothing came of those possibilities.
“Cassie, Baby, be ready,” Ada said, pausing, “There is every chance that I was killed.”
Cassie noticeably cringed. She could feel the edges of an episode start to creep in toward her mind.
Unexpectedly, a calm filled her. She breathed deeply, and focused. She had been in this mental space only a few times in her life. It had never lasted long, but she felt, for a moment, invulnerable.
“After I had developed the emotive glyph, I continued to work on the greater glyph project. I had access to the research quantum, and eventually my own personal quantum. I needed the quantum to try and nail the ideas down that I was working on. As soon as I started that process, I detected very subtle intrusions into my files, and eventually into my personal quantum. They were probes of subtlety that I have not encountered yet. In many ways, they bent the behavior of the quantum operating system itself.”
Cassie understood the fundamentals of system security well. Most probes are hidden among the many pieces of software and the thousands of active threads that made a computer so effective. In a true quantum, the power increased by magnitudes, and so did the complexity. A skillful probe could hide in that vast forest of computer processes undetected. Ada was suggesting that rather than hiding, the probes she faced had altered the behavior of the entire forest of processes.
“What can do that?” asked Cassie.
“At the time that I wrote this software and embedded it, nothing that I know of. It would require a great deal of expertise and money to do something like that. A Baron or a government perhaps.”
The term, “Baron,” had re-emerged approximately 34 years ago as slang for anyone that accumulated massive personal wealth. It was a shortened form of the term, “Robber Baron,” coined in mid-1800s America. A culture of wealth worship and admiration was entering into its ascendancy at that time.
“Baron” was a derogatory label, used by the poor to describe greed and wealth worship. It became part of popular songs bragging about wealth, and everyone wanted the moniker of “Baron.” A favorite insult of the time was “You're no Baron, asshole.”
Ada continued, “I started to suspect that I was under surveillance, and there was a break-in at our home when we were visiting Hong Kong. I could be paranoid, but the surveillance went up when I was working on the glyph project. It decreased when I stopped working on it.”
Cassie's father and grandfather had made sure that Ada had the skills to spot surveillance. She remembered many instances during her childhood when a casual walk turned into she and her mother taking a circuitous route to “shake” someone. While Ada had had little faith in personal security, there were still times that she had used it.
“Mom, why do you think that someone wanted you dead. I can see someone trying to steal you
r work, but killing you?”
“I know. It's a radical thought. It could have been a pirate or a pirate sympathizer, since your father had ended their way of life. Right before the trip, I had an encounter where someone attempted to assault me outside of an exhibition of my work.”
Cassie remembered the exhibit. She didn't care for parties, so she had avoided the reception for her mother, but it was a big affair. They were honoring her contributions to the new era. She spun a locket of hair around her finger, but remained riveted to her mother.
“I was attacked by a large man when I left through the back door. He wasn't there just for surveillance. He was very much near the door. I think I caught him slightly off guard. He seemed surprised and a little unprepared,” Ada said. Cassie was shocked. Ada had never given her a hint that there was anything out of the ordinary when she returned that evening.
“I dropped him like an old sack of dimes,” said Ada, smiling. It was a saying Ada's father used. The software used it nostalgically, and ironically. Physical currency had disappeared years before the encounter. Both of Ada's parents would have been proud. They had put her through grueling martial arts training, which had served her well during those troubled times.
“While I was holding the security door open with my shoe, by the way,” she said pausing for the appropriate kudos. “He had an active communication bracelet—one of the scrambled ones, so he was in touch with someone. I slipped back in and I had security escort me to my vehicle.”
“Mom, why didn't you tell me any of this then?” asked Cassie.
“Cassie, you were 17, right? You are also a bit high strung. I didn't want you getting worried about my trip to Mars.”
“I would have been right about the trip!”
“Cassie.”
Cassie calmed back down. She had been pulled out of the momentary calm focus she was in out of anger at her mother's statement. Cassie became slightly more angry at the thought that her mother had built a routine for Cassie's response into her custom module. She furrowed her brow, but quickly unfurrowed it, as the reflection window on the screens flashed an alert icon over the image of her forehead.
“I'm working off of data I've pulled off of your quantum, since I coded this into my logs long before my disappearance. I was not, and had not been working on the advanced glyph project for years. I think my original work had simply put me on the map.”
Cassie nodded. Whoever it was started watching them because of it and were trying to get a hold of her mother's notes. It wasn't a question of who wanted that information. Even those doctoral candidates had wanted such information. It was a question of who had the resources to get that information. Maybe they had been at her mother's reception to kidnap her. That would make sense. It would actually cost less to abduct her than it would to try to crack her quantum.
Ada's image sipped red wine from a wine glass. It was an appropriate image addition, as the odds favored her doing just that at this moment.
“I'm proud of you, Baby. Look at all you've done.”
“Mom....”
“No, listen to me. You can't silence me like you can another emulator. I wrote this for you, and any attempt to tamper with it... I'll just turn off. I'll even erase the data.”
“Mom! Okay. Okay.” Cassie knew her mother well. Destroying years of work on a whim is something she would do and not look back. Ada had her own issues with volatility.
“I built the bones. All this work of yours. It's the flesh. The beautiful, beautiful flesh.” Ada looked around her as if taking in the room, but Cassie knew Ada was scanning her work files. Somehow processing them through her routines. This emulation of her mother was an exacting simulacrum of her mother with one exception, the simulacrum was faster.
Cassie keyed an icon on her wrist piece. It showed an 80% total usage of the quantum's cpu. It was more than she had ever seen used other than during a diagnostic of the cpu.
“I take up a lot of space, don't I, Baby Girl?” Ada asked. “Humans are remarkable. I am simulating only a portion of the human mind. Very well, mind you. Only a portion, though.”
Cassie enjoyed her mother's attempt to lighten the mood. It was partly how she knew her mother in memory and partly the great skill of the simulacrum. It was time to know, though.
“Why would they kill you, Mom?”
“My best guess is the Mars trip. It could have been an abduction attempt gone wrong, but I don't think so. Who knows, it could have gone right, and I could be alive in some small room somewhere.”
It had been one of Cassie's worst fears. The formal investigation that had followed it, and the secret investigation by friends of Patrido and of Ada's parents assured that there was no kidnapping. Not even a government could have held her without a clue being shook loose by that firestorm.
The screen read Ada's expression.
“I'm sorry, Baby Girl. That's not very funny. If I had lived, I'd have found my way to you long before now. I'm gone.”
“This is just hard for me, Mom. I'm okay though. Surprisingly, okay.”
Ada smiled, and drank from her wine glass.
“I was going to Mars to see the new Great Quantum. I contributed part of the core software. I'm not sure if that was the whole story, but my logs are suspiciously light on the topic. That suggests to me I had something in the works. After all, I was going to spend almost 2 years away from you for it.”
“A year and a half,” Cassie interjected.
The True Quantum processors were something of a mystery. Great Quantums were composed of many quantum processors acting in coordination. In theory, the difference between a computer using a single quantum chip and a computer using multiple quantum chips should be a matter of simple scaling. It was not. A fair number of dual quantum processors existed, but they were prone to errors, and catastrophic failure. The processors, it seemed, would get locked in conflicts with one another, and even the smallest fluctuation in the support systems could kill the computer.
When Quantum technology matured, the race to build a True Quantum Supercomputer known as a Great Quantum emerged. To the winner, would go the mysteries of the universe—or so the thought was. As the technology scaled, and the requirements of a stable support environment became known, the price tag broke the 1 trillion mark.
That price tag was one of the contributing factors to the riots and unrest that Ada had known through her life, and that Cassie had seen subside to the relative peace that existed now.
A dozen attempts, amounting to slightly more than 12 trillion, were made. 1 worked in a 20 year period. With the other 11, the chips simply stopped working, and no amount of repair or replacement could salvage the Great Quantum. In most instances, standalone, single quantum processors would also stop working in the general location of the Great Quantum. There was no doubt that the attempts at the Great Quantum had generated a quantum mechanical effect that was not at all understood. Rather than lose the the function of single processor quantums, a worldwide moratorium was declared on Great Quantum research on Earth.
Mars made two attempts at a Great Quantum. The second one worked. It's placement was guided by the calculations of the existing Great, a scientist on the first project, and by Ada.
It was positioned in low orbit around Mars, in an eddy of Mars's gravitational field. The cost to get a successfully built Great on Mars was 4 trillion (including the failed computer). Maintaining the orbit required an additional 1 billion annually.
Critics were riled over the projected maintenance costs until the Great came online. Mars's Great quickly became called Big Red. Earth's became known as Mighty Blue (no name had been needed prior to Mars's computer). In the first trial to test networking between Red and Blue, it was found that communication was instant, and that Red and Blue had been communicating since Red came online. They were connected somehow through quantum mechanical effects.
That connection became the basis of the Ether that replaced the internet. In fact, the word “Ether” started as sla
ng for the unknown quantum mechanical interactions.
Ada's history was intertwined with the history of the quantums.
“Cassie, what happened to my quantum?” asked Ada. It appeared that an idea had burst forth to Ada.
“That's a dead end. Its processor fused two days after your disappearance.”
Support systems had advanced dramatically in 7 years. During Ada's time, they required non-stop maintenance. Cassie didn't say it, but she was distraught enough to not hold to the maintenance regimen for the processor, and had been sloppy with it when Ada had embarked for Mars. More than likely it was her neglect that had destroyed the chip. The memory which would have held any information for ongoing work also fused. Any information not moved to secure storage had been destroyed.