Heaven 2.0: Chapter 8 - Bonsai
Alchemist
A flash of lightning, flash being the operative word.
A message from someone calling themselves Egg. Weird moniker, but I could warm up to it. Is 'Alchemist' really that much better? They were the dreamers and techies of their day, but now they're all remembered for chasing the impossible and dying of mercury poisoning.
Screens actually draw images one row of pixels at a time, not instantaneously as commonly thought, though it may as well be to the eye because light is just that damn fast, and optical machinery that slow. Thousands of rows get redrawn dozens of times a second, every second, and you only ever notice it when something goes wrong. Designing to a spec and not one step further, argument for enucleation. There's a gulf between aesthetic sensibility and engineering consideration.
Egg somehow found our contact info, our civvie profiles. Scared the shit out of Curie, now known as Susie. As an aside, fuckin' Susie, really? She was our social engineer, our human prompt engineer. The rules and rhythms of verbal dances made themselves known to her, that is when she wasn't defining them herself, and she could lead each waltz with the charisma of an actor reciting lines written by teams of ten to twelve over months, and turns out she's a mother of two in Boca Raton? Her profile picture is of her and her dog? She's a PTA member? Insipid. She freaked out, said some things she'll probably come to regret about how after looking at our profiles she's the only one of us with anything to lose, how we probably sold her downriver because of the Muzakman thing.
Lightning seems instantaneous too, but it's also just light, and if you watch a slo-mo capture of some, like on Wikipedia, you can see every bend in the bold getting drawn in, like the rows on the screen.
TMJ, a.k.a. Thomas Midgley Jr. a.k.a. Xiomara Gutierrez-Acosta turned out to be a lawyer, patents. We'd guessed as much the third time she'd say something like 'This reminds me of US10015624B3.' Once is bar trivia champ, twice is savantesque obsession, three times is career supersaturation. Works with big tech companies all day helping them build ever higher fences around their respective golden geese. Shoring up their portfolios, directing their arsenals, keeping everyone M.A.D. Mutually assured destruction. If you want to sue me because my signup process works a little too similarly to yours, then I'll sue you because your subscription cancellation flow looks an awful lot like mine. This must've been some kind of penance for her. Information wants to be free.
The shape of lightning is defined by something called leaders. Every fork in the electron road is a calculable if not calculated decision; particularly large spasms of lightning are decision trees writ large o'er the sky. Like seeing God think. You can even sometimes spy the aborted thoughts fraying off the sides like frizzy hair during a thunderstorm.
"Egg has us at a disadvantage," I typed, "We don't know who they are; can we fix that?" Three dots in undulation as little lightning spread through skulls, forming responses.
Curie: i'm going to CUT OFF HIS BALLS!!
TMJ: how do you know it's a he?
Curie: only a he'd do this. . .
Alchemist: Unless we have proof let's not assume. For one, we go out implicitly looking for a he, we give ourselves a giant blind spot not looking at anyone else. Unforced error. For two, if it's not a he, then we don't fail the Bechdel test.
TMJ: could be another femme fatale
Curie: whatever, I don't care WHAT hatches from this egg, they're still dead. . .
Alchemist: You're going to sic Spot on them?
Curie: don't you dare. . . who says this chat isn't bugged. . . irl details are a huge op-sec no-no. . .
TMJ: alchemist doesn't care, they're still anon
Curie: yeah, about that, what the fuck!? you're not smarter than us . . . you're not neater than us . . . how or why did you not get outed. are you egg???
Alchemist: Careful Curie, you might sprain a finger touch typing like that.
Curie: ha ha ha . . . at least I can talk to real people . . . i'm only talking to you all til we get this sorted and then i'm out.
When you get to the millisecond level, the megahertz level, most all common understanding breaks down. There's actually two leaders in a bolt, or perhaps I should say bolts, of lightning, and one travels up from the ground. Where they meet is where the lightning is brightest. The other branches, those are just leaders that couldn't quite hack it. Two leaders seeking each other out step-by-step, that's a bidirectional breadth first search. Go wide, not deep. Cast many nets. Know a little about a lot, not a lot about a little. Like most structures with two leaders, it's blink-and-you'll-miss-it. But leaders need followers, and the body of the lightning is those followers, stepping carefully into the same thoughtfully considered footprints, like a stalking cat.
Alchemist: We have channels of our own. We can put out feelers for 'Egg', find out who they are. We've done worse against worse. Although they've shown us no ill will so far, and have given us the leak of the decade, I'd like to know a little more about who I'm dealing with. Who would give something like this away? For free? To us? Until we know better we operate under the assumption Egg is somehow hostile.
TMJ: agreed
Curie: +1
Alchemist: Okay. So let's think this through. The info Egg gave us; emails, footage, internal docs on Mental's strategy with their Odyssey 3 and its flagship app, the 'new and improved experience generator.' Egg obviously wants us to spread it. Expects us to. That's our whole M.O., we're the gals who leak proof of big tech bullying, stifling markets, information wants to be free and all that.
TMJ: i don't really care about that highfalutin shit right now, my mom's in one of those nursing homes
Alchemist: Yeah, it's messed up. we definitely have the ammunition for a real smear campaign with this stuff.
TMJ: buying puts now
Curie: on who, mental or the private equity companies who own the places
TMJ: both
Alchemist: But who would benefit from leaking it? Is it just some hedge fund with a huge short position against Mental? Seems almost, anticlimactic.
TMJ: occam's razor. explains means and motive. opportunity will probably make itself clear after some digging
Alchemist: I need to make sure we're not playing into anyone's hands. Mental's lawyers will be all over us if we post this.
Curie: and muzakman's lawyers will be all over us if we don't . . . do you think sending us our personal accounts was anything but a threat . . . it's an 'i know where you live' type of play. . .
TMJ: damned if you do, damned if you don't
But is lightning really operating via bidirectional search? Two blind leaders tapping walking sticks until they bump into other? Or is it a depth first search, type A, walk a path to its very end then do it all over again if you don't find what you want? Is every failed strand a discarded path?
TMJ: wait a sec, Experience Generator. E.G. Egg?
Curie: plausible . . . is someone at mental leaking it?
Alchemist: That could also work. Script kiddie would've sold it to the highest bidder, or ransomware'd it. Hacker would've kept it to themselves, use it to suss out a zero day. I think this might be ideological, guilt.
TMJ: i'd fucking hope so. they're making a walled garden out of our dead and dying!
Curie: it's disgusting. . .
Alchemist: Mental using the Odyssey's cameras to scan gam-gam's face and mannerisms, to sell it back to you. Yeah, most people wouldn't take too kindly to it.
TMJ: don't forget private contracts with private equity for 'training data.' these contracts, I had a look at them. gam-gam's likeness, once scanned, becomes the property of mental. and once she's in the ground, the only way to talk to her is with their codename Hallowed Experience And Venerated Event NeuralNet.
Alchemist: H.E.A.V.E.N. Ha. ha.
TMJ: there's a place in Harrowing Evil Layered Lazily for these assholes
Curie: religion was the first walled garden.
TMJ: don't let your PTA hear you spittin' like that
Curie: OP-SEC!!!!
TMJ: Sorry
Alchemist: Put that together with all their new hard and soft ware and it really looks like they're trying to bring about Heaven on Earth. There's gotta be at least one religious person in that building, possible leaker?
TMJ: thought you had to sell your soul to work there. at least all their lawyers i've worked with have
Curie: that's cause they're LAWYERS!
TMJ: roll eyes
Alchemist: I think I'm more inclined to believe this story. The SEC, FINRA, FTC, they'd be all over anyone trading on this info. FBI is going to clear their schedules looking for the hackers. All that risk for 2 and 20? Doesn't make sense. But stopping the rapture or whatever, they might take Pascal up on his wager.
TMJ: is a religious person more or less likely to set a trap for us?
Curie: could also be a competitor . . . someone who wants to hurt mental's rep . . . or see how the public responds before investing into it themselves.
If you know the starting conditions, the location, size, and weight of every dust particle, water droplet, and nucleation site in a storm can you precompute the path lightning will take? At every fork in the road is the next step a function of physics or circumstance. Is the path of a lightning bolt predestined or free to vary?
Alchemist: That could also work. Whoever it is, I think they want us to leak it. I think we want to leak it. I think they know we'd want to leak it. Our incentives are aligned, at least for the next step. It's neat and tidy and wrapped up in a bow. But if the carrot doesn't work, they know who we are. If there's something more byzantine going on, some game going on that we don't know the rules to yet, we need to buy time to RTFM. And until we can even the playing field, I don't think we want to test them.
TMJ: unless we want a house call from muzakman
Curie: mmMM!!!
Alchemist: So we're in agreement. We leak the info through the usual channels?
Curie: AYE AYE
TMJ: yup
Alchemist: To your battlestations, we got a new Lightning Rod Press post to put out.
As sacred spark issues from leader to leader, from cloud to ground, from Heaven to Earth the affected can become five times hotter than the surface of the sun. Such rapid changes massively increase the pressure on the affected, forcing all air out of the space, vacating the lungs. That sound is thunder, and it travels for miles.
I enjoyed this chapter a lot. Your powers are growing!