Amazing Stories 88th Anniversary Issue: Amazing Stories April 2014

by Unknown

  “This is it,” he mumbled as he pointed me to the large glass-topped desk.

  The entire room was empty except for the desk and the black chair behind it. I walked around the desk, dropping my bag of water bottles on the floor. As I eased back into the gel chair, I realized there was no computer in the room. “Where’s the system?” I asked, but Mark had already swooshed away.

  I fumbled around on the desk for at least fifteen minutes, before realizing it was a touchscreen desk. On the desk lay a pair of goggles that I later confirmed were the heads-up display of the system. I was pleased to discover a projection monitor that extended up from the surface of the desk. I’ve never gotten comfortable with the goggles. The computer model was designed to operate on voice recognition for instructions, but I’m a little old school and used the touchscreen keypad on the surface of the desk. An hour after arriving in my office, I was logged on and finding my way around the network. That’s when she walked in—Dr. Josephine Branner.

  With a carefully manufactured smile, she said, “Looks like you’re getting settled. Did Mark show you around the office?” Her short dark hair and crisp suit made her look androgynous.

  I nodded.

  “Did you get a chance to meet everyone?” Her voice was soft but commanding. It reminded me a bit of my third wife, Soshi.

  “Yes, nice place. Good staff,” I lied. Mark had just brought me straight to my office without meeting anyone. I am not the most social of people, so I didn’t care. “So you’re my new boss. Pleased to meet you.” I stood to shake her hand. She shook it with a firm grip.

  “I apologize for not meeting you sooner. It’s not the norm, but time is of the essence.” She stepped back to the doorway as if about to leave. “I’m sure they’ve told you our urgency.”

  I had only heard the basics. “Briefly,” I said.

  “I’ve had them prepare some documents for you outlining the expectations and deliverables. No need for dates,” she said. Her smile had vanished, replaced by deep lines of tension around her eyes. “We are two years past our initial launch date.”

  “So what is tech support supporting?” I asked.

  “We had a beta launch a year ago, and they are trying to work out problems with it.” Josephine stepped back into my office and pulled the door shut behind her. “I won’t mince words. We are in trouble. The beta is just to keep the investors placated. The guy that used to have this office was in over his head. Nothing works, and the entire system needs to be redesigned at the root.” She paused, narrowing her eyes as she scrutinized me. Finally, she said, “You’re the miracle worker; time to walk on water.”

  No pressure, I thought, as she strode from the room, but at least my predecessor had set the bar low.

  Don’t worry, I’m getting to the part that brought you storming into my apartment. I just need to set it up. Again, let me emphasize that the details are needed to show my innocence in these matters. Okay, okay, to show my innocence in these murders. There, does that make you happy? They weren’t murders, by the way; they were incidental deaths. What’s the current tally? Over three million dead? Wow—that’s a lot.

  Let me continue. Two weeks later it became painfully obvious that Geno Entertainment didn’t have the processing power to get the job done. I had continually requested a meeting with Josephine to discuss this shortfall, but she had been out of town, meeting with agitated investors. Friday afternoon as I managed to implement the first pass of my algorithm on the system, she walked into my office.

  Shutting the door behind her, she didn’t bother with the fake smile this time. “What’s so urgent?”

  It took me a few milliseconds to process the mental interrupt. My brain was already slowing down for the weekend. Her eyes slowly evolved into thinner slits as I transitioned my mental algorithms to her question. “Good to see you,” I said, hoping to diffuse her.

  “What’s so urgent?” she repeated, stepping closer to my desk.

  Succinct, just like my second wife. “We’ve got a problem.”

  She glared at me. “We hired you to solve problems.”

  “I know. It’s just that…we need more processing power.”

  As the last word launched from my tongue, she turned to leave. The glass door was open, and she was stepping out before she said, “No.”

  I leapt out of that gel seat like someone had spilled hot java in my lap and strode after her. “You don’t understand. Everything is going perfect. I just need more throughput to make it work.”

  She marched like a militant runway model between the cubicles as I scurried to keep up. “You agreed to do the job. Do it.”

  “But I need more equipment.”

  “More equipment is not in the budget.”

  Tech support heads began to float to the top of their cubes as if they were flotsam in the roiling water of some miscalculated gene pool, but when they caught sight of Josephine, they quickly settled back down. “Then put it in the budget,” I said.

  She stopped and turned to face me. “Can you do the job without the equipment?”

  “It will take much longer, and….”

  “Just answer the question. Yes or no?”

  “Yes,” I admitted, but I suspected it would take years to fully implement.

  She turned her back on me and began to walk away. “You have six weeks,” she said.

  “What?” I must have shouted, because she stopped on the spot, and all of tech support roiled to the surface again. “Six weeks? You said there was no timeline.”

  An inverse smile appeared on her face as she looked over her shoulder and said, “The schedule has been pushed up.”

  I later found out from the guys in the IT department that the investors had issued an ultimatum. Show results in six weeks or they were shutting the place down. By the way, if you need info, always check with the IT department first. They have access to everything. Six weeks was impossible. I was just getting started. It would be a miracle if I had a dozen modules evolved in six weeks. I needed a paradigm shift.

  Four weeks before the dog and pony show for the investors, I had my algorithm running smoothly. It wasn’t able to evolve modules independently, but it was close. I still had to oversee the process to make sure the neural modules were fit. As soon as it started cranking on its own, I was going to need the extra processing power. I searched every day for a solution. Finally, I found one. The surprise was it came from tech support.

  I had been sleeping in the office, taking short power naps at night and waking at scheduled intervals to check on the fitness of each evolving module. I found the gel seat at my desk to be a remarkably comfortable place to sleep. It was probably 3 A.M., when I wandered down to the breakroom. That night I needed something to keep me awake, as the module seemed to be hanging on something in the current evolution and required my constant attention. I took my display goggles along so I could keep track of the evolution remotely.

  As I sat sipping burnt tasting coffee in the breakroom and watching the data stream across my display goggles, I heard a handful of guys from tech support talking. Normally I tuned them out, but something one of them said caught my attention. I slid the goggles down and watched them over the top of the lenses.

  “It’s real easy. You just go to their website and download the software. After that you just download some data, let your computer process it and then upload the results,” explained a techie before he shoved some goo-filled chocolate treat nearly all the way into his mouth. The tail-end of the treat broke off and crumbled down his shirt, splattering goo everywhere.

  A plump techie with fluorescent green, spiked hair asked, “Why would I want to waste all that effort doing their work?”

  “To help them process the data,” the first replied, while still trying to chew the chocolate treat.

  “What?” said another.

  The first washed the snack down with some soda before saying, “They have all this data that they could never crunch through on their own, so they set it up for
you to download the software you need to help them crunch the data. It’s simple. You take a piece of the data, process it, then give it back to them so they can evaluate the results.”

  “Sounds like a waste of time to me,” said the lone girl at the table. Her head was completely shaved, and she had a ring in her nose.

  “It’s cool being part of the project,” argued the first.

  “But doesn’t it hog all your system?” asked spikey hair.

  “Not if you have a decent system,” said the first. “I’ve got a 128-bit system with eighty cores. It runs in the background, while I…” He stopped and looked up at me.

  I hadn’t realized that I had walked over to their table while they were talking. I was hovering over them.

  “What?” said the girl, looking up at me like I had just broken into her apartment.

  “Of course,” I said out loud. “That would work perfectly. I just need to set it up quickly.” I closed my eyes and rubbed both my temples with my index fingers. I felt a little wobbly. “The self-evolution system will need to be fully operational, but yes, that will work.”

  A greasy hand clapped me on the back. “Are you all right, Doc?” asked spiky hair. I looked around and everyone at the table was now standing. The small breakroom was empty except for the seven of us. The whine of the vending machines in the background kept the room from being silent as they all stared at me.

  I laughed, probably a little too enthusiastically because they all lurched back. “I’m great.” I looked them over one by one and settled on the first one who I’ll call Abe. You can add that to my charges, but I’m not going to tell you their real names. It serves no purpose. They’re innocent in these matters. Let me continue—I asked Abe, “How many beta testers do we have right now?”

  He looked at his compatriots and then looked back to me. “Probably about one million,” he said, after a little thought.

  “One million,” I echoed. “That would be great.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Abe. “You are really sounding burned out here, Doc. You’ve been pulling some long hours. Is everything okay?”

  “I’m great, but we don’t have much time.”

  “Much time for what?” said the girl. I’ll call her Eva.

  At that instant I made the decision to bring all of tech support in on it. I had no choice. I wouldn’t survive getting thrown out of this job. I needed the funding and the wages. Besides they all had nearly as much at stake as I did.

  “We have four weeks before we get shut down,” I revealed.

  They all gaped at me.

  “It’s true,” I continued. “The board is going to shut us down if we don’t show some real results.”

  “What kind of results?” asked Eva.

  “We need to give them a demo that blows them away.” I hoped they held my sense of self preservation. “To do that we need to implement a new strategy. We are going to enlist all of our beta testers to help us evolve modules.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Abe.

  I smiled. “You don’t have to. That’s the beauty. Neither does the beta group. They just need to have a computer.” My head began to swim a little bit. Maybe I blacked out, I don’t know. I snapped to, and I was seated at the table while Abe poked me in the cheek.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “I’m fine,” I lied. I was exhausted and a little nauseated. “We need to get started. Who do we contact about sending a message to all the beta testers? I want to let them know we are going to be sending them new content to download.”

  From there things picked up. In another week I had finished work on the self-evolving algorithm. I hastily coded the part that would characterize the purpose of each module, trying to keep the goal broad but applicable. I knew certain modules that would need to be evolved; however, the bulk would be created completely by the automated evolution system.

  Tech support was all on board. Word spread faster than a computer virus that the place was to be shut down if we didn’t show results. All in-house resources were now at my disposal. Even more importantly, all the beta testers had been emailed, and all of them eagerly awaited the download of their new content. My intention was that they would continue as they had before, playing the existing game, while I borrowed their system to evolve modules in the background.

  Two weeks before our deadline, things were humming along. We were evolving modules faster than ever. The speed of the evolution began to trouble me since I hadn’t been able to evaluate their fitness myself. I just had to trust that the algorithms were doing the job. That same week I found out that we only had one million beta testers because that was all we accepted. More were clamoring to join. Two million additional beta testers were added that weekend without management approval. Our neural network was evolving.

  I spent the last week before the board meeting trying to piece together all of the modules I could. I still worried that some of the modules may have evolved incongruent results, but I hadn’t found the time necessary to check them all. A small algorithm I had written a few nights before would at least run each module through a cursory fitness evaluation. At that time we had evolved approximately 4.5 million modules that we stored in non-volatile memory throughout the Geno Entertainment LAN. The people in the IT department had been incredibly useful in assisting us with these efforts. Of course they did all of this under my orders and are in no way responsible for the results.

  I want to be perfectly clear that none of my fellow employees had any way of knowing the significance of the work they were performing. To them it was simply the implementation of a computer game. Unfortunately, I had also lost sight of the potential hazards of our efforts. The short-term goals blinded me from the potential achievement of singularity. That eventually would prove our doom.

  Josephine called me into the conference room after she had already spent three hours with the board of directors. She seemed to have cut her hair even shorter than I remembered, but hadn’t yet plunged into shaving it all off. A sharp pain on the left side of my stomach felt like some tiny little robot was trying to poke its way out from inside me. It had to be the stress.

  As I entered the conference room, I noticed all the board members had Geno VR goggles and motion gauntlets placed in front of them. Not a single one of the thirteen investors could spare more than a scowl for me as I walked to the end of the long table. A lady wearing a very smart business suit sat towards the end where I would make my presentation. She had silken, dark hair tied neatly in a ponytail that reminded me of my second wife when I had first met her.

  “Good afternoon,” I said, before nervously taking a sip of the java I found myself still carrying around. “I’m Dr. Albert Van de Graaf. I’ve been tasked with taking your project to the next level. Rather than bore you with the technicalities of what we’ve been doing, I’ll show you.” Josephine had warned me that they had absolutely no technical savvy and would quickly be confused by any tech jargon. I picked up a pair of VR goggles near me and said, “Why don’t we all take a look. Goggles if you will.”

  The board all awkwardly put on their goggles and leaned back in their chairs. Josephine apparently decided not to participate in the demo. She left her goggles on the conference table. I whispered a small prayer under my breath and initiated the demo, before sliding my goggles on.

  The demo started by creating an avatar for every board member and me. The avatars were created by images shot seconds before in the conference room and translated into the virtual Geno world. I could identify each of the board members as I looked around the alpine meadow. The men’s suffocating suits had been replaced with brightly colored breeches and thick fur cloaks. Where before had been pot bellies and graying hair now stood bronzed bared chests rippling with muscles and long, dark, tightly-braided hair. The ladies wore equally bright dresses that flowed in the gentle breeze while their tousled hair streamed across their faces.

  The brilliant sunshine glinted off the dewy grass and purp
le flower petals that filled the meadow. All around them rose massive snowcapped peaks that tickled the clouds. The birds twittering nearby lent a soft melody to the peaceful scene as they flitted from stream to stream. Somewhere below them a powerful waterfall cascaded down a cliff roaring its defiance to the otherwise serene world.

  The board members walked around the meadow looking wide-eyed at every detail of the scene. Every micron of it appeared as real as any place they had experienced before. A couple of the avatars laid back on the grass and began to watch the clouds float overhead. They watched a bird soar high in the sky. The bird was so high it had to have been flying above the peaks.

  Slowly the bird began to circle lower and lower until it began to take form. Instead of the expected feathers and beak, the creature had scales and teeth. As it grew closer all could see that it wasn’t a bird at all but rather a dragon. The creature appeared to see the avatars sunning in the meadow and immediately began to plunge. It was like being at an air show where the planes screech towards the crowd before pulling up into some spectacular stunt. The crowd instinctively ducks as the plane approaches but later applauds as it speeds away.

  In this show the avatars ducked or scrambled for cover amidst one of the many outcroppings of rock as the dragon plummeted towards them. The dragon never pulled up. Instead it kept rushing towards the fleeing avatars until it seemed only a hundred paces away, and then it breathed a roaring cone of fire. Two of the avatars screamed. Neither were women. The demo ended. We all removed our goggles.

  The board members remained silent as a few dabbed sweat from their brows. At last Josephine said, “Well? Spectacular, isn’t it?”

  One of the youngest members, a man with a very stiff looking crew cut, said, “It looked and sounded great, but so do all the other games.” He looked around at his fellow investors before continuing. “I thought you were going to bring something new to the industry. We’re not paying for more of the same. We need something revolutionary.” He leaned out over the table slapping both of his hands down against the surface for effect. Looking directly at me he asked, “Can you deliver something revolutionary? I need you to tell me you can.”