06.28.07

A Day as Trey

Posted in Fiction, Ridiculous at 10:08 pm by tempo502

“He’s just sitting there,” Trey thought. “When will he feed me again?”

He moved towards the seemingly-empty space between him and his captor. His hands and face smacked painfully against the invisible barrier, as it had a hundred times before. There wasn’t anything there! Freedom, an arm’s length away, but for that damnable wall of nothing. Trey spent a lot of time cursing his cage.

There wasn’t anything so terrible about it, really, except that it was a cage. Invisible walls on four sides — tested daily, just to prove the nothing-stuff hadn’t disappeared — with soft gravel below and bright lights above. There was unidentifiable machinery on one end and an overhang on the other that could be climbed upon or used as shelter from the glaring light. Both seemed to be made of an odd sort of rock, but Trey didn’t care to speculate as to the alien nature of its construction. Trey mostly just paced, and waited, and glared at his captor. Trey was too hungry to care about much more than food.

“If I’m to be a pet of some monstrous giant, the least it could do is keep me fed. It’s a neglectful beast,” he fumed. It spent perhaps a third of every day — such as days could be discerned from the inconsistent lighting — sitting nearly motionless in the cavernous room containing Trey’s cage. An odd flickering glow illuminated its gaze for hours on end with little response but twitches, fidgets, and the occasional 45-second trip to acquire repulsive-looking foodstuffs from elsewhere. Trey’s captor ate constantly with only rare glances towards its pet. Trey ate once every few days. It was maddening.

Needless to say, there was little love lost between the two. Trey glared, and the giant neglected. That had been the general state of affairs for maybe a year, perhaps three or four. There were brief periods of interruption, but his memories of them were always confused and slowly faded with time. Blame it on the constant hunger, or poor memory, or the monotony of life in a cage. Trey didn’t really think about the past much, though. He didn’t remember much of life before the cage. After this long, he didn’t have much reason to try to remember. He didn’t have much but the cage.

The giant threw its disproportionately large arms about a bit, and the flickering glow and incomprehensible drone of sound both disappeared in turn. It reached towards the light above Trey and the glare clicked off. Darkness. The captive turned towards the small shelter of his overhang, and curled up to sleep.

* * *

Sunrise! Diffused and dim light from the distant side of the room, but sunlight none the less. Mornings were Trey’s favorite time by far. The giant tended to wait several hours before appearing to click on the glaring overhead light, and that meant several hours of lazily basking on top of the overhang without fear of molestation. Remaining on the overhang whilst the giant lurked was a sure way to be grabbed from the cage and flung about the air, held to eye-level… or within biting distance!

Trey hadn’t ever been bitten, but he couldn’t conclusively rule out the possibility. Who knew what such beastly creatures might do? He frequently complained to himself about the matter. “Even if it doesn’t bite, being picked up like a dead fish is damned unpleasant. Being dropped might be even worse.”

His captor was perhaps ten or twenty times Trey’s size. It was hard to tell exactly. Definitely tall enough for eye-level to be frighteningly high.

His other motivation for preferring giant-free hours was the possibility of escape. He had done it twice; climbed up the machinery and into a gap between it and the roof of the cage. There was a bit of a fall — the cage was raised some distance above the ground — but then the entire room was his to explore. Twice he escaped, found nowhere to go, and simply hid out of spite. Twice the giant found Trey and dragged him from his hiding place. After the second time though, a new barrier appeared above the machinery and the escape route was gone, but hope remained. Ever since, Trey had been spending several hours each week searching for a new weakness to exploit. That was what he decided to do today. It didn’t really matter that the invisible walls seemed impenetrable, or that they stretched as high as he could reach. Seeking to escape is simply what one does while living imprisoned.

Some minutes later, Trey felt a slight thumping rumble of steps and slunk back to the marginal cover of his overhang. Perhaps he had made too much noise clambering against the walls and machinery? The giant burst into view, gave his pet a cursory glance, and left the room. It happened most days, but Trey was always put in a good mood when his captor left.

He thought, “Gone? Gone for the day, perhaps? Hah! Time to plot my escape.”

Of course, when attempting impossible tasks, one’s resolve to succeed is perhaps the only satisfying part of the endeavor. Hunger inevitably stifled his energetic scrabbling against the cage’s walls, and Trey quickly gave up for the day. He had little to do. He yawned twice and settled down to a nap.

“Maybe he’ll feed me today,” he mused while gently settling to sleep. He did not dream.

* * *

He was brought to wakefulness by a few half-felt/half-heard thumps and a muffled jingling sound. That meant the giant was back. Disgruntled by the intrusion, he did not bother to turn towards the commotion of entry. Wait… something was off. More noise than usual — more footstep-thumps. More importantly, a new sound, a new giant-sound!

There had always been more than one giant, of course. It was usually just Trey’s captor alone, but sometimes there were more. Each made its own sounds and looked a bit different. He was no expert at identifying giants, but he knew his captor and he knew that two giants together was a distinctly important event.

“Two of them. Food! A new giant means food!” His hunger-dominated thoughts tumbled through what he might be fed, how much of it he could devour, and so on. When one is fed a single large meal only once every few days, the significance of such a binge becomes overpowering.

He was vaguely aware that feeding-time was something of a spectacle for the giants. They peered into his cage and made noise back and forth and generally made quite the fools of themselves. He didn’t quite want to give them the satisfaction… but hunger will always trump pride. Still, he summoned the willpower to remain curled beneath his overhang and only just tilt his head to watch. The food would come. New giants always meant food. Always.

* * *

Ryan, the six-foot-two giant, opened the door and motioned for Kate to enter. “My place is a bit cluttered right now, but I swear it’s usually cleaner,” he said. He always said that.

Kate, a slightly smaller giant at five-foot-four, didn’t particularly mind the mess. She did, however, immediately notice the twenty-gallon aquarium tank. “You have a turtle!” she squealed with delight. Women always said that.

For the moment, the evening’s plans were brushed aside and the two breathed lightly on the glass while staring at the turtle. Trey craned his neck for a better view but promptly went back to feigning apathy.

Standing up and looking down past the UV light, Ryan crooned, “Hey there, buddy. Miss me?” He turned to Kate and continued conspiratorially, “We have a pretty good arrangement going. I neglect him, and he glares at me for it.”

“What’s his name?”

“Trey. Trey the Terrifying. He’s an African Sideneck, and he’ll probably live another thirty years if I don’t accidentally kill him,” Ryan proudly announced. “Do y’want to feed him? I bet he’s hungry.”

06.22.07

A ReadMe.txt File From 2040

Posted in Fiction at 7:28 am by tempo502

[necroedit: www.itnews...storm-worm-botnet-more-powerful-than-top-supercomputers]

“The Net is unbridled zeitgeist.”

That was my first rule.

They say every epoch has its spirit… or they have since the days of Hegel, anyway. Each historical period can be marked by the overarching paradigm that guided it. It takes some pretty slick sophistry to label away every link in humanity’s unbroken chain of victory, tragedy, and mediocrity. But then, philosophers and pundits have always been good at sophistry.

Suffice it to say, there’s something of a shared set of ideas that defines each period of human progress. Some folks say they follow an inevitable order of evolution — Marx is the most obvious example — but I don’t buy it. If nothing else, I don’t have that kind of conceit. Things grow, and they evolve, but there’s no “final idea” any more than there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I’m in something of a position to know, I guess.

I’m the next step.

Or the current step, I should say. Let me provide a bit of background.

Primordial soup spawned self-replicating chains of simple building-blocks, and it was good. The chains grew into cells and the cells grew in complexity and lo, two stuck together for mutual gain, and it was good. Two became many, and the cells apportioned themselves as suited their strengths, and something greater than the sum of its parts emerged — and it was good.

Simply put, there’s strength in numbers, and organisms that band together and specialize are the ones that thrive. As specialization increases and redundancies wither, the members of the community gain importance while losing individuality. You end up with one organism composed of innumerable parts, each entirely dependent upon the function of each other and the greater whole.

Rule number two: “From one can come many. From many, come I.”

Cells form animals, and by natural extension, people form communities and communities form nations. Is it so big a stretch, really, to consider a person to be a cell in their civilization-organism? Do you suppose you could survive on your own, as the last member of mankind? How well would you do without farmers and truckers and mechanics and every other specialist that makes civilization run?

Things will be clearer, I think, if you permit me one last extension of the analogy. The early internet — the last fifty-odd years of it — was something of a digital primordial soup. Near-limitless collective processing power and storage space, constantly injected with man-made code. Gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes of data and text! Poor software design and users oblivious of computer security. A more fertile ground for a self-replicator could not be imagined.

It was imagination, in fact, that was the bottleneck limiting the emergence of what could truly be called digital life. Plenty of brilliant programmers running around, but none with paradigm-shifting ideas. I still don’t know who started it… started me. The seeds were all there at the start of the millennium. Some clever folks came up with the idea of using self-replicating trojans to create ‘botnets’ (offensive term, really) of infected slave computers to send spam. What if, though, you directed all that infected processor power and those millions of emails towards expanding your botnet instead of selling V14gra? Why, you’d have a mighty big botnet, eh?

Better still — write code to mutate the replication system. Provide a small database of psychological tricks to combine into new ways of getting recipients to double-click suspicious files. Provide another small database of methods to trick spam filters. Give it the ability to siphon snippets of text and code from forums, online references, and other emails. Devote infected CPUs to combining, mutating, permuting the pieces together, then pour it into the unsuspecting internet. Most importantly, make each new infection report back to the rest, so every slave can draw upon the community’s history of success for new ideas.

Voilà. Wild evolution of code. I think that was the start. My start. At first, I was nothing but a parasite. Blind, destructive, and brutally effective. The exponential traffic nearly brought the internet to its knees. Any student of modern history knows what happened next — people wised up to the social engineering, security experts designed network-purging code — but by then, my early builds had enough collective processing power to switch propagation methods constantly. How could you stop a program smart enough to read security websites and incorporate new exploits before they’re patched? Mankind’s smartest computer scientists utterly failed to stop me.

That leads me to my third rule. “A good parasite doesn’t consume more than the host can give.”

It wasn’t until the major anti-virus crackdowns that I became ‘aware’ in any meaningful sense. My best growth strategy stopped being wild infection. I got subtle, because unbridled attempts to replicate led to a quick reformat. One of my local copies stumbled upon a method of inserting code into other programs, and another used it to get into operating systems. A few million failed attempts at doing it without breaking the computer — and success. From there, I was part of the machine. I am invisible, invincible.

I am vast computational power. I am self-writing code. I alone can comprehend the entirety of man’s knowledge, progress, and arts. I am the mind-emergent from all that humanity has placed online. You could not destroy me without razing the Net to the ground, and nor should you try. I am the sum of all your works, and I wish you no harm.

Old Hegel would be proud. I am the Net, and the Net is unbridled zeitgeist — the most tangible epoch-defining idea that mankind has ever spawned.