Total Generations: 7,319,008,024
Significant circuits printed to file “Progression 10-29-2012.1.cct”
File truncated at maximum size.
Gene mismatch? It meant that nothing in the population of circuits could be represented genetically in such a way that anything could reproduce. It was like having chromosomes that didn’t line up… like trying to mate a chicken with an octopus…
The output file had two gigabytes of the most recent data, far more than he could reasonably wade through.
Nonetheless, Trevor scanned it, and to his surprise he immediately noticed a pattern. The circuits had gone from enormous, to, well, practically nothing. The final circuits were so small that most couldn’t even be represented in a single gene.
Somewhere along the line, the program had convinced itself that smaller was better… more efficient maybe? Once this idea – this meme – entered the scoring function, it couldn’t be stopped. Ultimately, the population wore itself down to nothing… it committed suicide.
That was the bug.
Now, how did it relate to the human simulations?
~
Trevor made no progress in his search for a fix the remainder of the day. Before he left, he wrote a short response to Damon on a fresh sheet of stationery:
Damon – Understand the bug. Next step fixing it. Why not have simulations do it? Burnt myself on computer. What is the sphere inside? Also, why was my memory stick stolen and brought to the office? Sorry, my handwriting sucks. Prefer phone. Trevor.
He positioned his note on the desk, tucked Allison into bed, and headed out into the shadowy dusk just as some winter clouds began to dissipate and reveal the moon.
Chapter 26
What the NSA Doesn’t Tell You
T
he next day, Trevor picked up a few movies for Allison. He chose animated Disney movies because they were the most vibrant. When he showed them to her, she jumped up and kissed the camera.
“Yay! Thank you thank you thank you Trev-ee! Let’s watch one! Robin Hood Robin Hood!” She clapped as Trevor put it in. He raised the back of his left hand to his cheek and felt its warmth… he was blushing. His sister, Amy, used to call him “Trev-ee” before she could fully pronounce his name.
It was strange to him that a simulation could make him feel this way. She was just a bunch of electricity moving around in a box somewhere.
Yet… though she may have been a bunch of ones and zeros, she was a bunch of ones and zeros that gave him the nickname “Trev-ee.” And when she’d leaned in to kiss the camera, he’d noticed her neck – he’d seen her jugular vein pulsing steadily with her heartbeat.
A genuine heartbeat.
If that didn’t make her real, what would?
And if she
was
just a bunch of electricity zipping around a hunk of metal in a box, then what was he besides a modicum of current firing around in a slab of meat? That’s all the brain was… three pounds of water, fat, and protein with a dash of electrical activity.
Trevor grasped the flesh on his forearm between two fingers, inspecting it, studying the resultant wrinkles, consciously experiencing the sensation of his own touch. Life at all was a miracle, let alone life in a computer.
“Trev-eeeeeee,” she said, snapping him out of a trance. “Hillary asked about you on the phone last night.” She said it in a sing-songy voice while pointing at him, waving her arm in a little circle.
“She did? What’d she say?”
“Oh… nothing.” Allison smiled.
“C’mon, tell me!” he laughed.
Allison just shrugged.
“That’s all right,” said Trevor. “I didn’t want to know anyway.” He diverted his gaze, feigning utter lack of interest.
“She just told me to be a nice princess for you because you deserved it and wanted to know if you talked about her.”
“She did? Well, you certainly have been a nice princess for me,” Trevor smiled. “I think it’s nice you get to talk to her on the phone.”
“And I get to see her every day, too!” Allison corrected, grabbing a framed photo off her dresser. “Look, I keep her right next to Daddy.” She held the photo up so Trevor could see. The confines of the shiny metal frame held a girl in her late twenties with a waterfall of wavy brown hair, knowing green eyes, and a smile as pure and radiant as her voice had been.
“She’s pretty, huh,” said Allison.
“Just like Maid Marian. Want me to put on Robin Hood for you to watch now?”
“Yay!” Allison mimed the action of shooting a bow and arrow, then pretended she got shot in the chest. She fell to the ground, clutching a red magic marker “protruding” from her sternum.
Trevor chuckled and put the movie in. “I think you’d make a great actress someday.”
Her corpse on the floor smiled and nodded, then went back to being fully dead, complete with tongue hanging over the side of her mouth. Once the opening credits began, she hopped up and did her best to whistle along.
Trevor seated himself in front of the desk and found Damon’s next note spanning pages:
Trevor – Glad you found the bug. Now fix it.
I still do not know about your memory stick. It was gone when I returned to work, and I haven’t been able to coax the information out of Kane without giving us away. It will take time.
I choose not to communicate by phone because I no longer trust the airwaves. I mentioned before that we have ties with the NSA. You don’t have a secure cell phone, so it is safe to assume they can – and likely do – listen in on any of the standard phone transmissions we have. After the internet surge they would be foolish not to.
Now, you’ve been waiting long enough; it is time I explained our untold history and technology in detail.
About 26 years ago – back in 1986 – Day Eight started as a spin-off from the national intelligence community. Our company was then called Intelligentech, as I believe it still was back when we hired you. We only had a score or so of researchers, mostly as transfers from both the NSA and CIA.
We were created as a spin-off because, of all things, funding. The NSA had a project they needed to devote massive resources to, and we would get more total funding as two separate entities than as one. We were a public company, which allowed us to easily get contributions from the government’s black budget laundered through various donors and venture capital firms. (Every time the government “loses” billions of dollars – like the twenty-five billion that evaporated into thin air from the Iraq war budget and cannot be accounted for – it’s not actually “lost,” it’s funneled to a spread of black budget projects like this one. Any project that has the potential to forward America’s efficacy of warfare is especially funded. Lucky us.)
Our task was to improve their computer technology, plain and simple. Yet it wasn’t so simple.
Now then, if you were to go interview with the NSA, what they’d tell you is that the pay isn’t great – after all, it’s just a government salary – but that you wouldn’t want to work for them for the money. Instead, you’d come for the opportunity of a lifetime: they’d tell you that you’d be working with technology that’s ten years ahead of the marketplace. Ten years! In the computing world, as you know, that’s multiple generations.
Ten years ago, you could burn the entire contents of your computer onto a few CDs… now, with hard drives as vast as they are, you’d need a few thousand CDs. Moore’s law predicted that we’d be able to double the number of transistors in our computer chips every two years, an exponential increase in processing power… and we’ve actually been outpacing it! We’ve gone from ten million transistors on a computer chip to ten billion in the last decade.
So imagine what that would mean if the NSA’s computers were ten years ahead of the public! A nerd’s wet dream. And plenty of nerds they got.
Like I said, they’ll tell you they have technology ten years ahead of the industry. Now, what they won’t tell you, is that they’re lying. The NSA’s technology isn’t ten years ahead of the industry. No. These days, their technology is actually a full sixteen years ahead, or more. It’s outpacing the industry at an accelerating rate. And they have supercomputers built out of this advanced technology.
I know this because we helped build them.
You were wondering about the computer in front of you, the one you should not have touched the inside of… (hopefully the residue from your fingers won’t cause the structure to warp from uneven dissipation of heat). It is a fully-functional optical computer. The sphere in the center of the heat sink web-array is its optical processing core.
Trevor stopped reading and put down the note as he scooted over to stare at the computer.
This is an optical computer?
An optical computer was the stuff dreams were made of.
Many researchers attested that it was the next big leap for computing. Present technology relied on the movement of electrons through transistors, which was laughably slow when compared to the movement of photons. Photons – or particles of light – moved at the speed of light, which Trevor had memorized in high school physics as precisely 299,792,458 meters per second in a vacuum… or 186,000 miles per second. In other words, very, very, very fast. Nothing could travel faster than the speed of light. And only things that had no mass could ever hope to move that quickly. Like photons.
Provided you
did
have the technology to build an optical processor – like the one that was supposedly harbored right inside this computer – it would be at least hundreds of times faster than your typical PC. That explained how his program had run so quickly… taking mere seconds instead of hours.
Trevor ran his finger along the top of the computer case, expecting its touch to imbue him with magical power. Even though he’d witnessed its speed, knowing the source of its power was intoxicating. He continued reading:
These optical computers were one of the most revolutionary computer technologies we worked on. The one you are using has a processor from one of our earliest models, it is about fourteen years old.
Trevor read the last line again. For the NSA and Day Eight, this was ancient history.
You have perhaps heard some of the news this past year about the advances toward a viable optical transistor. Michael Larkin of Harvard has made the first one that is efficient. By using a semiconducting nanowire to confine a rippling plasmon to incredibly tight quarters, it becomes sensitive enough to an incoming light beam such that only one photon is necessary to affect a change in a control beam.
That last bit even went over Trevor’s head.
This is the exact method we used in our first optical transistors. But don’t mistake this for a coincidence. There is a reason public technology is only sixteen years behind the NSA and Day Eight: we keep it that way. When the world outside needs a push in the right direction, we help.
Akin to our plant at Femptodyne, Michael Larkin has been on the receiving end of our influence, although he was handled differently. He likely doesn’t even know we exist. It works like this: One day, we send someone – let’s call him Mr. X – to a conference that Larkin is also attending. Mr. X finds a session that Larkin walks into, and happens to sit next to him. Mr. X, knowing that Larkin is pursuing an optical transistor, starts a friendly conversation in the moments before the lecture commences. Then, casually, Mr. X presents the possibility of using a semiconducting nanowire to do somesuch thing, and immediately laughs at himself, dismissing the notion entirely as tomfoolery. The comment is timed such that the lecture begins as he’s laughing it off, so Larkin’s brain has to switch gears and has no time to think on what Mr. X has said. Afterwards, Mr. X doesn’t even say good bye, he leaves the conference and doesn’t come back.
Yet the seed has been planted. It could be a day later, a week, or a month when Larkin’s mind finally wanders back to the notion. By this time, he doesn’t even really know where it came from, has no idea he didn’t just think it up himself. And the more he thinks about it, the more it begins to make sense. And before you know it, he’s got a team working on it, and the solution to optical transistors enters the public domain.