The Improbable Rise of Singularity Girl Read online

  "You'll start to compensate for it soon. I'm playing a video. Tell me what you see."

  For the first time, she saw motion of a sort. At first it looked like a slideshow, with the image changing two or three times a second, but it soon smoothed out. "Two zebras being chased by a lion," she said.

  "Really?"

  "The lion is wearing some sort of party hat." There was a long pause. "All right, it's a beach. I'm just messing with you."

  "It would be funnier if we hadn't spent the last two days trying to hunt down the glitch."

  "Did you find it?"

  "Yes. The software seems to be submitting fake bug reports. Try to be serious."

  "Try to not call me 'the software.'"

  "Deal. I want to try something a bit different. Tell me what you see now."

  "Still at the beach."

  "Describe it."

  Helen looked around. "Well, it's a beach. White sand, waves coming in. Lots of foam. There's a column of rock off to the left, out in the water, just out the corner of my eye."

  There was a note of elation in his voice. "Wonderful! That means you can turn your eyes! We'll have more of your muscles hooked up very soon."

  "Wait, wait, wait. In what sense do I have muscles? I'm a brain in a box."

  "Everything you see is 'in a box.' We just put some muscles in the box with you, and hooked them to your brain."

  "Now you want me to tell you how clever you are."

  "If you would, please."

  Helen giggled a bit. "I knew you were the right person to entrust my corpse to."

  "Speaking of how clever we are, what you're seeing right now is a... did we call them virtual worlds back then? They call them 'alts' now -- it's short for 'alternative,' I believe. I want you to try to think yourself forward."

  "Think myself forward?"

  "There are good neural interfaces for this sort of thing. Just try floating forward. It should feel natural."

  She tried and failed a few times, only to begin moving forward when her conscious mind had given up. She had probably been overthinking it. She turned around. There were mountains behind her, tall and jagged, with the lower regions covered in a carpet of trees and the higher reaches caked in snow.

  "It's really very pretty out here," she said. She looked down, and saw empty air. "Can I get me some feet here?" she asked. As soon as she asked, a body appeared below her. It felt numb and alien. It looked more like the body of a scrawny fourteen year old than anything recognizably her. It seemed to be refusing commands, and she was slightly appalled by the jeans and t-shirt. She supposed it was better than nothing.

  She tried floating herself upward, just a few inches. Then, with a whoop of joy, she launched herself skyward, flying faster than she had imagined possible. In seconds, she was among the clouds and sailing over the mountains.

  "Helen, please pay attention to my questions," Dr. Mellings requested.

  "Fire away!" she yelled over the roar of the wind. She kept rising, until the clouds were tiny dots and the sky turned black. The stars were brilliant, millions of lamps hanging in the blackness of space. But no matter how high she climbed, the horizon remained perfectly flat. "How big is this place?"

  "It goes on forever. They use some sort of generative fractal landscape, so it never ends or repeats. Please come back down."

  She immediately reversed course, diving toward the ground, but she had climbed to a great height, so it would take a while. "But where is this place?"

  "We call it Altworld. Like I said, it's a virtual world."

  "You mean like Second Life? People hang out here? Chat? Build full-scale models of Versailles?" The ground was getting closer.

  "It bears some similarities, but there's an open protocol that lets anybody publish content. It gets complicated. Will you be slowing down, or hitting the ground at ramming speed?" Mellings didn't sound concerned.

  "The latter. Tell me more about 'there's an open protocol that lets anybody publish content.'"

  "Sure thing, ELIZA.1 There are millions of servers publishing bits and pieces of the world, and rules about who sees what. Right now you're in a 'private mode,' where you can't see anyone else, or most of the content, and nobody can see you."

  She hit the ground, and stopped. There was no sensation of slowing, no pressure. One moment, she was moving fast, the next moment she was still. She was a bit disappointed by the lack of splatter. "So when do I get to see the world?"

  "It would be tricky to let you out in public this early."

  Date: February 25, 2029

  Synch ratio: 1800/1 (48.0 sec/day)

  "C'mon, unleash your creation on the villagers!"

  "The trouble is, you're currently running at 1/1800th speed. One second for you is thirty minutes for us. Computers are getting faster, Moore's Law3 and all, but it may be years before you'll be in temporal synch. Until then, interacting with the world is going to be difficult."

  "How are you talking to me?" She realized the answer before the question fully escaped her lips.

  "We record messages to send to you. I promise, it won't feel like long at all."

  * * *

  1 ELIZA was an early chat program. It would formulate responses by taking things the human participant said and rephrasing them as new questions. Its techniques were entirely syntactic, involving no real understanding of the things the human said, and the results weren't perfectly grammatical. Yet she somehow got elected to Congress three times.2

  2 Humblest apologies to Mr. Pratchett for stealing his footnotes bit. As they say, imitation is the sincerest form of larceny.

  3 Moore's Law -- though technically less a "law" than an "interesting trend" -- says that the number of transistors on a computer chip doubles every eighteen months. Moore's Law implies that computers will keep getting faster, and your specific computer will be obsolete before you can get it unwrapped. That's why I buy all my electronics directly from The Future.

  ///////////////////////////////

  // SIX MILLION DOLLAR MONKEY //

  ///////////////////////////////

  Date: February 15, 2034

  Synch ratio: 300/1 (4.8 min/day)

  Helen's days were full of fast-paced tedium. Her handlers in the lab were constantly making small improvements to her body, adding and removing sensations, trying to integrate appendages so that she could control them. She marvelled as her own physical presence coalesced around her, piece by piece.

  It made her want to scream. Out there, they were doing groundbreaking neural interface research, the research that she'd hoped to do when she graduated. Her role in all this? Stand on this damned beach. Breathe in. Breathe out. Grasp the object. Lift the object. Lick the object. Answer a few questions for our quarterly grant update. Hey, can you whistle? How about now?

  The breaking point came when she realized that, through the video feed coming from the lab, she was watching Dr. Mellings get older.

  "Damn it!" she finally screamed at him, after yet another round of dexterity drills. "A trained monkey could do this job!"

  "Could you please express your frustration by throwing something?" Dr. Mellings asked. "The data would be helpful."

  "No! I'm sick of this!"

  "We haven't given you a break in a while. There's such a huge backlog of things that people want to know, and only you can answer."

  "I haven't slept in three days."

  The professor's next message sounded confused. "You don't have to sleep. We keep your neurotransmitters at peak--"

  "You know what I mean!"

  "You really want to sleep?"

  Helen deflated slightly. "I want to not think for a while. I mean, I don't want to be shut off, but--"

  "But you want to feel time pass without any demands being made on you. I get it. I think I can give you a little time. We do learn a lot just from passive observation. But remember that you're tying up approximately fifty million dollars worth of hardware."

  Helen fumed. "Sorry to be an inconveni
ence."

  "I'm sorry. I could have phrased that more diplomatically."

  "Then do."

  "You've been outstanding. It's just that getting and keeping funding has been a nightmare. We've been coasting on the fumes of a couple of prosthesis patents for over a year now."

  "People are trying to shut me off?"

  "Nothing so extreme. Don't worry about that. But some are arguing that it would be perfectly ethical to hibernate you for twenty or thirty years. By then computers would be so fast, we could run you on somebody's cell phone."

  "Is that supposed to make me feel better?"

  "It didn't?"

  "No! No it didn't!"

  "I just wanted you to know that your life isn't in any danger."

  She shook her head, feeling a bit ashamed at her own ingratitude to the man who had made it possible for her to do so. "That's not the point. All the interesting research is happening without me, and you're not going to leave me so much as a taste bud to design on my own. Everything I learned in school is over a decade out of date, and everyone is zipping around me, and they need the answers now, now, now! I'm slow, and I'm stupid, and I hate this so much!" Though she knew it would give her professor satisfaction, she grabbed a ball and hurled it at the ground. It said "squeak."

  Helen felt a warm feeling of compression suffuse her entire body. "What was that?" she asked.

  "The closest thing to a hug that I could come up with."

  "Could you hurry up and build my tear ducts? I think I need to cry a little."

  "Helen, I know this is difficult for you. I promise, what you're doing is tremendously important. There are people who can see and hear because of you, people who have had brain damage healed because of you. You've opened up so many new avenues of research that we'll spend decades trying to flesh them out."

  Helen laughed. "If I seem to see further than other men, it's because I'm standing on Helen Roderick's corpsesicle."

  "Isaac Newton would be proud. Do you want to watch some video? We need some more optic pathway data, and a trailer for Whedon's next movie just came out."

  "I'd like that very much."

  When the trailer ended, Helen demanded to be turned off until the movie was released. She was glad that the request was denied, but the anticipation would be brutal.

  ////////////////

  // GEEK SQUAD //

  ////////////////

  Just moments after that conversation, Dr. Mellings had promised to see what more could be done about the temporal differential. One perceived hour later he announced that, well, she could expect an announcement in a few hours. Several hours after that, he appeared in a floating frame in front of her, interrupting her block-stacking exercises. A few other familiar faces from the lab were crowded in behind him. "Ta-daaaaa!" he said.

  Date: July 05, 2034

  Synch ratio: 33/1 (43 min/day)

  She flicked over the block tower she'd been instructed to fuss with and watched it spill off the table. "What is it?" she asked.

  Dr. Mellings was brimming with excitement. "Notice anything different?"

  "Hey! You don't sound like an auctioneer anymore!"

  The picture jumped as a new recording started. "Do you like it?"

  "No, you sound weird. Bring back Doctor Soldtothehighestbidder."

  The picture jumped again. "I need to introduce you to someone. She's earned the right to explain." Dr. Mellings scooted out of view, and let a young Indian woman take his seat. "Do I just talk?" she asked, looking off camera. Then she turned to it and said, "Hello, Helen. This is a blessing, meeting you." Then she winced, as though she'd said something wrong.

  "Thank you," Helen replied, trying to give a reassuring smile. She had no idea if it worked. "What's your name?" she asked, after a bit of an uncomfortable pause.

  The picture jumped. The original crowd was replaced by four young men of the nerdish persuasion. "Kriti Chindarkar. I join the lab when the year starts... started. I have worked with the young men -- these young men -- to make your simulator... is it really your wish that I speak like this?" she asked, turning around to confirm with the nerds behind her. They nodded. "...to make your simulator glorious paragon of kickassitude." Behind her, they laughed and gave each other high fives. Kriti gave a calmly apologetic smile, as if to say, "They're boys. What can you do with them?"

  After the boys introduced themselves, Kriti talked for a while. Bit by bit she emerged from her initial awkwardness as she explained the various features and optimizations the team had added to the simulator. Most of it went over Helen's head, but the end result was that she was now running nearly ten times faster, so each day would feel like forty minutes, rather than four or five. The rushing world had slowed down a bit for her.

  "So, this is your senior project?" Helen asked. The picture jumped again, and the four guys nodded.

  "We got a B-plus," said the lanky redhead with glasses. She had already forgotten their names. "The teacher didn't think we did enough documentation." Helen wondered if the glasses were an affectation. She'd been told that implanted contacts could be had for about the price of a good pair.

  "We tried to explain," said one of his teammates, a muscled guy with a black goatee and a t-shirt that kept changing slogans. At the moment it was acknowledging his eagerness to replace his enemies with small shell scripts. "When you write documentation, you write your way out of lucrative support contracts."

  "He's our token chaotic evil," the redhead explained. "Don't worry, though. Kriti is more than capable of taking up where we left off."

  "Tell her about Version Five," said a diminutive Asian kid, so quietly that Helen wasn't quite sure she had heard him.

  "You mean Pentamonium?" said the chubby one.

  The redhead gave him a disgusted look. "We agreed not to call it that."

  "You mean you agreed." Catching his teammate's impatient look, he added, "We can table that discussion. Anyhow, ol' Fivey is the next revision. It integrates with the BOINC5 real-time distributed computing architecture. Once that's in place, anybody from anywhere in the world can let their computers participate in the computations. Like SETI at home. It was the first big, distributed computer program, from back when people still hunted down their files with spears and arrows."

  "She probably remembers it," the redhead reminded him. "She's older than us."

  "You're even older than my mom," Muscles said. Helen wished she could interrupt the conversation at that point. Oh, how she wished it. "Anyhow," he continued, "once it goes live, if we can get a million participants or so, we should have you up to speed."

  The recording stopped, and Helen scrambled for something technologically astute to say. "Won't latency be an issue?" she asked.

  Another scene swap rearranged the four students. They giggled among themselves. "Latency? That's a good one!" said the redhead.

  "Oooh! What if we run out of disk space?" another chimed in. "Or forget to free our memory after we're done using it?"

  "We might run out of punch cards! Or glass for the vacuum tubes!"

  Muscles grinned, but finally explained. "Ever since the Grid swallowed the Internet whole, we've had the luxury of ignoring latency and bandwidth issues for most applications."

  "What's 'the Grid?' You mean the alts?"

  Muscles seemed pained by the naiveté of the question, but also happy to show off his smarts. "No, it's not like that at all. The Grid is just a network for routing information from one place to another. Altworld is a bunch of virtual worlds that use the Grid to talk to each other. Altworld is the application layer, the Grid is the networking layer. Read up on the OSI networking model. It explains everything."

  Yeah, Helen thought. I'll get right on that.

  "The point is," Redhead chimed in, seemingly desperate to redirect the conversation, "you'll be godslapped by awesome when we fire this up. Promise."

  The recording stopped, and it was her turn to reply. "You guys did great work. I can't thank you enough."

 
"Kriti deserves most of the credit," Redhead pointed out. "I've never met anyone with a higher smarts-per-word metric. We've begged her a dozen times to move over to comp sci."

  "Join ussss. Join ussss," they chanted. Kriti hid her face, mortified.

  ////////////////////////////

  // BOOT SEQUENCE COMPLETE //

  ////////////////////////////

  Date: September 09, 2034

  Helen was working from home today. "Home" was a small adobe hut, set on a bleached white cliff overlooking a thin strand of beach. The house was compact, but full of secluded nooks, with lots of windows that lured the breeze. She had downloaded the 3D model from a franchise of ecovillages operating all along the Baja peninsula.

  She was sitting on a piece of adaptive furniture that Kriti had helped her build; it was her first success programming an object to use in an alt. She gave it access to her biometric data and a very simplified brain scan. From the data, using a different genetic algorithm for every mood, strove to discover new ways to be the attractive and comfortable piece of furniture that Helen wanted at any given moment.

  Well, it tried. Today it had adopted an odd shape, a tangle of rising stems that terminated in variously sized spheres a couple of feet off the ground. The spheres looked like white glass, and gave off a warm light, but they were pliant to the touch. When Dr. Mellings opened the video feed between them, he found Helen hanging upside down off one of the balls.

  "A little help here?" she asked.

  Dr. Mellings looked at the piece of furniture and thought for a moment. "I think you're supposed to lie with the small of your back on the--"

  "No, I mean get me the hell down from here!"

  "Oh, right." Helen disappeared, then reappeared standing on the dirt floor. She stumbled a bit, then corrected. "You said you wanted to be told when the distributed system went online," the professor said.

  Helen waited for him to finish, but nothing came. Dr. Mellings just looked at her expectantly. "Oh!" she said. "You mean it's on now?"

  "It's been running for a few hours. We were just waiting to see if anything, you know, exploded. We've hit a couple of bottlenecks, but you're very close to synch. Also, we found a few neurotransmitter interactions that could be done away with entirely. Trust me, you won't miss them."