Chapter 528: Resurgence - Black Box (1/2)

DAY ONE

Well, this is new.

I supposed I should introduce myself.

My name is Darsh Chasu Igwe. I work for the Nexus-Sigma Omnicorp. While NSO produces a lot of stuff, I've worked in cybernetics and ”life security products” for nearly two hundred years. It's a good job, and NSO treats us really well.

That's a given. It isn't like before the Diaspora and before food/nano forges. Someone has to want to work and gain skills and want to be employed by one of the big hyper or omnicorps. You can pitch a baseball of ants on any world and live like a pre-Diaspora King for nothing more than a few minutes of effort a day. Part of our 'post-scarcity society' I guess.

I've been fascinated by the technology of the Sentience Upload Download System and the Soul Uninterrupted Disaster Storage System since I was a kid.

One of my classmates when I was 9 got killed and was back for class after lunch. It really struck me.

Man, kids are careless with their lives.

Well, enough about that. Let's move on.

I was tapped by NSO to figure out what was wrong with the SUDS. They've moved us to a Black Box Project of NSO's own making. Nothing as elaborate as the Black Box systems you see on the Tri-Vee. I mean, we all know those don't exist. No, this is just a standard station in an empty system around an empty world.

There's four hundred of us here. Fifty scientists, like me, security personnel, logistics staff, and a few shuttle pilots and drone pilots.

Our job, our mission, is to figure out why the SUDS went three red lights.

You have no idea how many times I've been told ”well, just go check the hardware.”

It's not that easy. We don't know where the master control systems are. Every time I get blank looks. Nothing like a high powered executive (who I suspect enjoys his job because he enjoys lording over people but is too gutless to join the Confederate Armed Services) staring at you and saying: ”We provide SUDS network hardware and software. What do you mean we don't know where the master system is?”

That's problem number one.

I have to explain, every time, that the SUDS was designed before the Glassing. How far, we're not sure, but I've always suspected it wasn't very far. Maybe a few decades. A century or two at the most.

I can hear your eyes rolling from here.

Look, back then, average Terran life expectancy was a lot lower. Right now you can expect to easily live to five hundred years before neural fragmenting and synapse mapping unraveling takes place. Now, in a way, that's an oversimplification. Starting at about five hundred to six hundred years, most human start overwriting older memories. Their personality center, a small portion of the brain, gets overwritten by new experiences. See, much like DS's, the human brain is more EPROM/RAM than it is ROM.

I could go into a huge lecture about how your memories are extremely inaccurate, but that would go into symbolism and how the brain stores information in a holographic form.

But Darsh, I hear you say, I can remember being 10 and being stung by a bee. All right. Where were you? What were you doing? What were you wearing? What did the sky look like?

And again, I hear you argue: But Darsh, if I took a bullet to the head, it would destroy my memories, not like a holographic system.

To which, I would reply: You're a fucking moron.

I suppose, I could explain how holographic memory works and why it's such a big deal.

Picture you have a holo of you and three friends at the Tomb of Rushmore. Now, I snip a corner off. A slight bit of the information matrix is lost. Not much, a tiny bit. So, now there's a slight loss of fidelity. Each snip loses a slight bit of fidelity. I can expand one of those tiny ships and you could make out blobs in front of a big blob.

It's an oversimplification.

A gunshot through the head is like removing the middle of that holo. Now, unlike a holo, the human brain heals, regenerates, so to simulate that, we'd put holopic paper in the middle and allow from bleed. Notice how you've got an exceptionally blurry pic of you and your moron friends in front of the Tomb of Rushmore.

But...

Today we started the Project. It's got the unimaginative corporate name of Project Tiny Toilet Vektor. I don't know why, that's dumb as hell, and Vector is misspelled thanks to some branding genius probably.

That meant turning on all the SUDS hardware, making sure the datastreams are tapped, and just setting the system up.

Then Mister Susan Carl McNugget wanted to know our progress.

Oh wow, is she an annoying one. See, she prefers to use a male body and title when engaged in corporate business, but she's too impolite and crass to use her male name. That's why we have middle names, so we can swap back and forth. She does it for a power trip. She also likes jumping down people's throats for using the wrong pronouns, while she has on her digital header that she's a male.

It's a power play. Plain and simple.

I saw her yell at a trio of green mantids who used the wrong pronoun. They used the pronoun on her header. Green mantids can have a hard time telling gender because to them we're just big bipedal biological primates. I had one tell me it's easier to identify humans by respiration and blood pressure mathematics than by names.

The mind of an engineer.

But she chastised them loudly, publicly, for nearly ten minutes.

That doesn't bode well. Pronoun etiquette has been around since before the Glassing, and if the violent primitives that were humanity back then could abide by it, the least she could do is observe it.

I know, I know, that makes me sound like a pronoun bigot, but I wouldn't care about it so much if using the pronouns that match her body and her digital header and personal identification header wasn't the opposite of what she wants to be called. And she isn't even polite about it, she launches into a tirade and threatens or levies mislabeling fines on people for it.

It's a petty power trip.

The worst part is, she knows that we know it and it gives her some kind of satisfaction.

Apparently, before she was tapped for the Black Box Project 09026 she was engaged in overseeing a massive project involving a new type of superluminal communication system. I have hope that her hair trigger temper just manifests in yelling about identification rather than sabotaging the project.

I think she's just nervous.

That's all right, though, I guess. We're all nervous and janky because of this Black Box Project. Apparently nobody knew exactly what we were going into.

I guess that's enough for today.

--Darsh

DAY THREE

Mister McNugget wants half of the SUDS network hardware online but not network attached. She's convinced we can make a local area network so we can examine message traffic.

It's not working.

As soon as the entire system is turned online, it synchs up.

The plan yesterday was to disable the spooky particle system and use tight beam hyper frequency systems for them to communicate with each other. As soon as the spooky particle system is disabled, the system locks itself out.

Mister McNugget demanded that we 'go through the code and strike 'that' portion out.'

Lochard spent an hour trying to explain to her that it isn't that easy.

There are 12.5 trillion 'lines' of code, although 'blocks' is better. Worse, it uses a proprietary machine language system with its own proprietary libraries.

People have spent their whole lives trying to decode that language.

She insisted that since it can be patched, we have to know the code.

Imagine trying to describe polymorphic self-adjusting multi-adaptive machine language code to a complete moron.

That was me trying to explain the SUDS software and firmware to Mister McNugget.

It was really hard for her to grasp the concept that everyone's been pushing patches using different computer languages because somewhere, in all of that code, is an instructional set that translates the code to the proprietary system.

She went on a rant how we're the best educated corporate engineers in known space and there's no way a bunch of primitives from before the Glassing could invent something we can't understand.

I was irritable.

I told her ”They charged machineguns without SUDS. Can you understand why?”

She fined me two hours pay and slammed the door to her office so hard it cracked the frame.

Tomorrow, we'll try something else.

--Darsh

DAY SIX

This has been a complete clustered system from the get-go.

We got everything hooked up, and despite our best efforts, the entire thing synchs up to the master system within minutes of being turned on.

We stripped a SUDS repeater down to the bare minimum hardware it needs.

Picture a hovercar. The latest model. All the bells and whistles.

Now picture stripping it down to find a miniature car inside.

The bare bones system is... well... It's almost nothing.

Computer processing node with less power and ROM and RAM than my fingernail mounted 'engineer's buddy' computer. A single 'dual lobed' spooky particle oscillator. A microfusion power source that uses dimensional friction for power.

About enough to run a datapad.

That's it.

That's the entirety of the SUDS repeater.

Almost nothing.

Mister McNugget started screaming at the hardware that it can't do that.

It just sat there.

Smugly.

A SUDS repeater is huge. Massive. The size of a cargo lorry.

It turns out that the real system is the size of a greenie.

I suggested to Mister McNugget after she was done screaming, that we should go over the hardware we stripped off and examine it closely, see what and why.

I should have waited for her to calm down more.

So, I'm fined a half day's pay.

I'm tempted to quit the project, quit NSO. That'd teach her.

But I've worked for NSO for a long time. My friends are all here.

So, tomorrow, we're going to see what we can figure out about the particles themselves.

--Darsh

DAY ELEVEN

Mister McNugget asked if we knew how to create the particles. When she was informed that we do, they can be run off on a Class-IV nanoforge or higher, she asked why we needed to examine them so in-depth.

She feels it's slowing the project down and we're wasting time.

Thom pointed out that there's an issue with the particles.

We tried to demonstrate, but I don't think she understand.

OK, if you run off a cluster of those particles, specifically, a hexidecimal physical cluster, they immediately start vibrating. Even not hooked up to computer equipment, just existing in the matrix container.

If you hook up examine the particles, then compare them to the SUDS network system, they vibrate at the same frequency and charge.

OK, let me back up.

When you run off particles out of a Class-IV nanoforge, which is capable of atomic restructuring, the particles vibrate at normal.

But not the SUDS particles.

They start vibrating in synergy with the SUDS network particles.

We ran a search.

The particles aren't used for anything but the SUDS network.

As a joke, Green Team Five ran up a bunch of particles, to the point you could see the cluster about the size of a bird's eye, and dropped them in a turkey-gravy milkshake.

And we had a breakthrough.

The milkshake exploded all over the dining hall.

Mister McNugget spent ten minutes yelling at Green Team Five.

She's going to end up with a waste extruder hose in her living quarters.

That milkshake means something, I'm sure of it.

--Darsh

DAY FIFTEEN

Wow. Where to begin.

Let's start with the particles.

The milkshake was a clue. Team Three were going over the ultra-high fidelity high speed footage.

The milkshake heated up in 2.258234 seconds. When it reached 525C, that's when it exploded.

But the state didn't change.

You're reading that right.

The liquid of the milkshake reached 525C but did not transform from semi-solid ice/liquid mixture despite being over the freezing limit.

Even exploded, it splattered the walls and slowly melted, the temperature rapidly (0.45 nanoseconds) dropping back to -25C.

So we looked at the spooky particle containment system.

Normally, the particles are held in a near vacuum injected with argon gas that is then pulled out and returned to the tank. It's a closed system. Nobody really looks at why. Spooky particles have weird rules.

We all looked at the system's evolution. Originally it used pressurized Freon for the refrigeration and cooling.

Talk about primitive.

Get this, you need cooling on the outgoing argon gas system and around the containment chamber. It generates heat.

Not a little heat.

A LOT of heat.

We tried not injecting argon.

We saw a vacuum somehow glow red and the whole system suddenly ruptured and the spooky particles evaporated, the hyperalloys melted and landed on the floor in a splash.

Which was instantly cooled to room temperature.

These particular spooky particles are... well... spooky.

In other news, Mister McNugget is being trolled by her personal message system because it's calling her Xir, which makes her practically froth at the mouth. All incoming messages to her are labeled Xir and Xr. which makes her freak out.

It's coming from Corporate, which is the weird part. She pulled a software team off investigating the SUDS software to examine the message system.

They verified. It's the corporate mainframe message system that's mispronouning her.

She's stomping around right now mumbling.

As for me, well...

I've got an idea. A long shot that Mister McNugget told me I have to do in my off time.

I reached out to the various libraries and got unedited pre-Glassing, Age of Paranoia, entertainment media.

Mister McNugget told me that she believes I'm wasting my time and intellectually lazy.

I'm looking for stuff right around the time SUDS was invented by going through and watching the back of the actor's necks, watch how they move.

I'm going to use media deep diving to figure out when, Pre-Glassing, that the SUDS was invented.

Via the actor names and life dates.

--Darsh

DAY NINETEEN

Self-Assigned Research Status: No results. Extensive analysis has shown that the majority of media are digital constructs, not real actors.

This may sound crazy, but I think someone deliberately went through and edited these. Replaced the real live actors with digital versions.

Mister McNugget said I was paranoid. When I pointed out to her that it was called the Age of Paranoia she got mad and told me to invent a time machine and jump up my own ass in a clown suit with it.

Primary Project Goal Status: We've literally gone backwards.

We literally know less than we did coming into this.

You have to understand, everyone here, every engineer and scientist, has developed hardware and software for the SUDS network.

We found out we've been busy painting murals on a cave wall, unaware that the WHOLE FUCKING MOUNTAIN RANGE the cave is in is actually the SUDS.

Fifty-eight years ago I developed a new type of self-guiding polyphasic neural plasticity adaptive fiber system that was considered a breakthrough in SUDS technology. It enabled the SUDS to be put in infants without changing their neural plasticity so that they could learn uninhibited.

Preliminary testing showed it might be able to add Rigellians to the system.

I built, invented, created something completely useless.

We've got fast-clone licenses. Personally, I find it borderline unethical to run off a clone and do human testing on them.

It's creepy.

It's why I avoided living sciences.

To me, there is an ethical quandary when running off a clone of someone to do experimentation on them, then 'flushing' them, and regrowing a new one.

I'm of the belief that those are still people. No, I don't believe in a divine spark, I'm not even an adherent of the Digital Omnimessiah.

But I believe those are people.

Mister McNugget tried to bully me into working with that section of the project and I flatly refused.

I offered to resign from the project if she insisted.

To be honest, I don't think she expected me to hand her a digital resignation and for me to tell her ”Sign this. I'm done.”

She backed down.

I took a datalink picture of her expression.

Fear.

Part of me is sick that I made a threat that caused fear.

But part of me, a weird part, was strangely satisfied.

I'm avoiding the topic.