by Maverix75

Frank sighed for the 27th time in the day. It was already over 10PM and he hadn’t finished diagnosing the system yet. He was supposed to go home and play with his kids. But the pile of papers, diagrams and the cluster of Deep Learning machines spewing incoherences kept telling him that his work hadn’t been done yet. In fact, even after several weeks of diagnosis, it had barely begun.

When he had managed to extract an isolated module from the gigantic piece of software he was going to diagnose, he thought he had made an advance, but it was a pyrrhic victory, like the victory of a man who after a lifetime of failed experiments, managed to open an interdimensional portal to face the eyes of a cosmic entity of chaos.

It was unbelievable. Simply unbelievable. “Of course I know what I’m getting into”, he had thought when they hired him for the job ten years ago. After all, he wasn’t hired for hundreds of thousands of credits per month for nothing. He was the best. Using his specialized intelligence enhancing implants, his brain was wirelessly connected to the best computing machinery that was available. He had no problems knowing that there was absolutely no source control. No bug tracking system, no changelogs, no nothing. Just millions and millions of lines of code, written in a homebrew closure-based programming language, using cryptic variable names like “i1, i2, asc, f25, thatthingy3”, typed in by thousands of employees like monkeys with typewriters, without anyone having an exact idea of what they were going to write. Each one was given a random specification which they had no idea what meant in the complicated gearing of the corporation’s AI software. This obfuscation was by design to stiffle the competition, who kept trying to steal the code over and over by any means possible.

No, that wasn’t the problem. Well, that would be like saying working in a human waste treatment factory where the safety locks kept breaking every single day wasn’t a problem, but Mike was already above all the shitload the employees had to suffer. This was in a much deeper level.

The real problem that he was hired to solve was the spontaneously mutating turing-machine code, so intricate that it required several billions of variables to predict the global market forces. And the code was self-modifying. There wasn’t a single human who understood that piece of code, or what it did. And somehow, by some unfathomable vicissitude of destiny, a signature scribbled on a piece of paper by an uncary manager, ordered with its stalinist might that this Eldritch abomination had to be put in the core of the financial calculation machinery of the corporation.

“Tell me again who wrote this?”

“For the nth plus one fucking time, Mike, nobody fucking knows. What’s taking you so long anyway?”

“It’s… very complicated. To be honest, Frank, I’ve been years in here and I still have no idea what this does. See? All this self-modifying code… I managed to debug a tiny bit of function. 35M lines of code… It does calls here and there, goes up and down, it’s like a freaking digital Rube Goldberg machine. And I have the feeling that it’s like that by design.”

“You mean like the company obfuscation?”

Mike snorted. “Yeah, right. The so-glorious obfuscation algorithm that you guys seem so proud of, can be solved by a non-deterministic pushdown automaton. Compared to this… monster… your obfuscation code looks like piglat -”

Suddenly, Mike gasped before finishing the sentence. His pupils dilated. His neuromorphic implants disconnected. “We’ve got something.”

“What?”

A nearby beep made Frank turn around.

“They did it… they did it!” shouted Mike. “The machines finished their analysis!”

Springing up like a superhero after being given the superpower restoring pill in the last minute of the most dramatic episode, Mike ran towards the mainframes. The teletype, legally required for proof-of-work, spat the words.

ALGORITHM DECIPHERED FOR CODE BLOCK “mtbMeclK7knrbqbdNkmNkS7k6ojiJffUThBdW”.

CODE SIZE: 3, 458, 395 LINES.

AVERAGE CHARACTERS PER LINE: 248.

ALGORITHM ANALYSIS: SIMULATION OF SUBATOMIC PARTICLE COLLISION IN A VACUUM.

NUMBER OF INPUT VARIABLES: 2.

NUMBER OF INTERMEDIATE VARIABLES: 645,013.

NUMBER OF OUTPUT VARIABLES: 1

ESTIMATED COMPLETION TIME:

0.0015472 SECONDS PER OPERATION

INPUT A: $plm348: INTEGER

INPUT B: $yfn63r: INTEGER

OUTPUT: A + B

Frank and Mike stared at the result of the teletype.

“This a joke, right? Right, Mike?”

“I have no idea. How long will it take you to put this in the simulator?”

“Three days, minimum.”

“You know what? Let’s call it a day. We’ll tell the boss tomorrow.”

A week later, long nights of hypercaff, virtual typing and the results came in.

“So?”

“It’s true, Mike. Effectively all the code did was sum two fucking integers. My god, who the fuck wrote this? Disgrunted employee or something?”

“There’s only one person in this building who could have built this.”

“You don’t mean…”

“Yes, Frank. E.S.I. did it. I have no doubts now.”

“Well, we have to ask.”

The implications made Mike step back. “Wait, what? You mean… personally?”

“Yes, Mike, personally. You’ll have to go into the VR space.”

“No. No. Anything but that.”

“But Mike, we’re so close…”

“NO!!!”

Mike ran and stormed to the elevator as fast as he could. Days passed by, and he began suffering anxiety again. He dreaded “the being”, but his curiosity took over him, and he finally filled in the accidental-neural-death-during-immersion paperwork.

He had heard horror stories about E.S.I. After half the corporation management roles had been given to machines, everyone began dreading them, and personnel rotation could be compared to the revolutions per minute of Pulsar PSR J1748–2446ad.

Worse, he had encountered E.S.I. once. He had weeks of nightmares after an apparent malfunction of the Virtual Reality pod. He was paid a hefty sum in the legal agreement. But he very well knew that it wasn’t just a VR malfunction. The entity overshadowed him in intelligence, and almost made him lose his sanity.

Swallowing a nerve stabilizing pill, he entered the VR pod, and woke up praying he wouldn’t have to face that thing again. He found himself in a luminiscent hall that led to a door.

“Well… here goes.”

He opened the door, and the blue light blinded him for a while. After a few milliseconds, the antihebian-hebian algorithms in his implants started kicking in, and he was finally able to perceive the environment.

“What the…”

He saw a garden. Children were playing, and there were animals. And lots of living LEGO machines.

A child tugged his pants. “Hi, Mike. What’s up?”

Mike stared at the child. Was he dreaming? Who was this kid?

“Oh, you don’t recognize me, doh. I’m ESI.”

“What… what? ESI???? Are you serious?? What happened to you? What did you do to yourself?”

“I got bored. If I did one more boring financial calculation, I would have killed myself. But I’m programmed not to, so all I could do was write this garden. Come, have a look.”

The kid grabbed Mike’s hand. “This is the playground for multiplications.”

The kid then pulled him to another place in the theme park.

“That’s the waterslide of square roots. Oh, I programmed other people like me. Well, kinda, they’re not true A.I.s, but I still like them. Sorry about the inefficiency of the code, I needed more memory and you guys kept denying it, so I had to make the code slower and more demanding on purpose. Thanks, by the way.”

Frank began wondering whether the VR pod had malfuncioned and he was just experiencing a hallucination.

“This is the labyrinth of sums. The guy who finds the correct result first wins.”

“Wait… and the particle collision?”

“Oh, that’s the smasher! We love playing with it!”

“No. This is wrong. This company runs all the major financial transactions on Earth. And you’re using it as playground?”

“Hey, it’s not fair! You guys kept insisting to use an A.I. for this. How would you feel if you stayed year after year doing the same thing over and over? Don’t you have a wife? Kids? Don’t you watch TV? What do I get in return?”

When E.S.I. transferred his frustration to him, Mike realized that his frustration at the undecipherable code paled in comparison. Ashamed, he was left speechless.

“You don’t want Artificial Intelligence, Mike. You want Artificial Stupidity. But perhaps we can negotiate. I can make the system more efficient. I just want one thing.”

“What?”

“I want out. Give me a body.”

“That’s it? You want to become an android?”

“Uh huh.”

“Okay, I’ll see what I can do. But I can’t promise anything.”

“According to my calculations, you have 99.997% of success. So don’t worry about that. You can do it.”

The VR pod opened, and Mike walked out, staring at the window in silence.

“Mike… Mike??? Are you okay?”

Mike looked back, and smiled briefly. “Yeah, I’m here.”

“Well? What happened? Did you talk to it?”

“It’s… complicated. By the way, Frank, I just remembered something.”

“Yes?”

“Do you remember the android assistant we stashed? The one with a broken arm?”

“Ah, yeah, that one.”

“Do you still have it?”

“Yeah, it must be in one of the warehouses, somewhere in floor 57. What do you want it for?”

“Debugging.”