The festival was in another three weeks. People from around the
world were coming to the Green Valley to share their culture and
their cooking. It had been about nine years since the Event and
things were going well. The first generation of houses and community
locations were built and most of the materials in the rubble had been
sorted and taken to storage yards.
Arlo Benington
wasn’t sure how he felt about the festival. It would be
interesting to see everyone, but he felt like the celebration might
drag on longer than he wanted. There wasn’t any requirement to be
present during the entire event, but avoiding it totally might raise
some questions.
There was a certain
mental calculus to deciding how much time to spend there, how visible
to be and how involved in the conversations. Too little interaction
and people might assume he was missing. Too obvious and people would
notice his gaps in attendance. There were a few times he needed to
be there in an official capacity, but most of the time he could be on
call and that would suffice.
It was peaceful
existence, but that was almost a problem in itself. No looming
deadlines, no insurmountable problems to solve, no complicated
dynamics to engross yourself in. Arlo looked for challenges, and the
event had quite a bit of busywork that needed doing.
Arlo had done a
respectable amount of work for the festival, but mostly data entry
and lower tier organizing. His job was sorting out the sizes of
various bits of furniture needed for each of the guest displays and
making sure they had enough power. On top of that, making sure the
individual requirements added up were still within the limitations of
the buildings set aside, and if not, finding workarounds. As well,
taking the various menus and fact sheets and combining them into a
single document of consistent style, while still respecting the
original designs.
It was the kind of
work that needed to be done right, and if it was, it would be
virtually invisible. While many in the area were working on the
physical products, they relied on Arlo to get the original plans
sorted out. That meant that Mr Bennington’s job was done early and
by himself – as he liked it.
Too many people
working on a project was a situation he liked to avoid, where
individual preferences didn’t synch up, and there wasn’t some
underlying math or science to fall back on.
Arlo could take a
break while everything was being built, but he also had the job of
doing the final inventory. Again people seemed to underestimate the
amount of relevant detail Arlo had made when setting out the plans.
Quite a few had drifted from the specifications given, meaning more
work to get similar sized chairs and tables together, rather than
having them interchangeable.
Thankfully the
electrical work was more up to spec, and tolerances for that kind of
equipment were within a few percentage points. He tested the various
mixers, heaters, warmers, and other kitchenware a second time, making
sure there wasn’t a setting or mode that drew higher than rated
power.
That was the problem
when everything was made from piecemeal parts. You didn’t know
exactly how it was made, and there was enough ways to do anything
that you couldn’t just group things together by function or size.
He was familiar with the individual parts though, as well as the
machine code used to run them. After all, he had designed the
MakerProof system himself. A few devices tended to have an overdrive
mode that used extra power to over do the job, blindingly fast
mixing, or quick grilling. Arlo knew enough about the situation and
devices to know that all of them doing that at once would be bad.
He did a quick poll
of the guests to see if anyone absolutely needed the extra mode. A
few said that a handful of dishes would use that occasionally, but
not enough to warrant the power upgrade needed to make all the
devices in the full range. Instead Arlo disabled the upper settings
of most of the devices and put together a shared document, that would
keep track of the handful of ones that were untouched.
In his mind that
seemed to be the ideal solution, but the others weren’t as
practised with planning out group ownership of individual devices.
Too often they would be forgotten when used, cleaned and ready to
move to the next group, but no one specifically assigned to do the
handover. Frantic chefs and cooks would be expecting a mixer or
grille ready, but having to stop what they were doing and track it
down.
Arlo sighed at the
third time it happened and finally picked out someone to be in charge
of moving the power-hungry devices.
During a quiet
period, one of the guests cornered Arlo, commenting on his work. Arlo
had thought he had kept his involvement quiet, but the man explained
that he had opened the MakerProof Credit section of the files and
seen the initials AB. Arlo was intrigued, very few people knew about
that function and “AB” wasn’t a huge sign either, it was the
barest minimum one could enter into that section, and most people
might simply mistake it for default values. The man asked him about
Project Reboot. He hadn’t heard of it, which was a bit odd as he
thought he had a handle on all the major computer topics of the
moment.
At the guest’s
insistence, the two moved to a slightly out of the way section of the
dining hall to resume their conversation. They lamented about how
the AI were being overused when trying to build a new computer
network and how it was still pre-Event tech being used without true
understanding. The man again brought up Project Reboot, but kept his
talk vague, as if he was worried about being overheard.
It was actually a
bit of a secret, as it was the kind of project where too many ‘cooks’
could spoil the end result. The man handed him a small card which
had a name, Terrance Danberry, with a website and login on it. On
the back of the card was a circle with a line through it – a kind
of stylized power button.
Arlo stayed at the
Festival a few more hours, but was eager to get home and find out
more about Reboot. As the crowd started to disperse to other
buildings, outside of his planning area, he made a quiet exit.
He turned on his
computer and went into the Rebuild Network. He quickly typed up the
address and got to a signin page. The password was already on the
card, but no name was given. Arlo tried his full name, and a rather
plain page opened up. It was a redirect to a site he already had
access to. Not the most helpful thing, but Arlo realized that there
were some old AIs set to crawl around the Network to map it out. If
they saw a login and redirect, they were to do their best to prune
the system and remove redundancies.
Sure enough, when he
re-entered the page, it immediately informed him the site was
classified as a redirect, and if he wanted to go to the final site
instead. That message only appeared because Arlo enabled it. The web
browser normally skipped past sites already scanned and pushed you
back to compiled and cleaned areas. His hobby was going through old
sites and finding information that content scraping didn’t classify
correctly. Arlo couldn’t stop the prompt, at least without
reprogramming the browser, but at least it left him on the site.
Arlo paused, and
thought about what the AI scrapers would do at the site and what he
would do as a human with contextual information.
He tried the login
again, but this time using the initials “AB” instead of a
variation on his name. The AI was more sensible than thorough and
didn’t try non-unique entries, like initials, for name fields.
That was the ticket.
He was presented with another page, this time a quiz, but with only
a handful of questions. They seemed to be multiple choice, but the
answer grid was way too big, and also allowed for more than one dot
per line to be filled in.
The answers seemed
pretty straightforward, and precisely the kind of thing an AI would
be good at. So it wasn’t surprising when he did the quiz the
obvious way he ended up at another plain redirect.
Arlo went back to
the quiz and looked for any hints. At the bottom of the page, it
showed his login in a small rectangle that look suspiciously like the
card he was handed earlier that night. The answer dots were also in
a rectangle.
Arlo looked again at
the card, and noticed raised white areas around the black power
button logo. He took out a pen and drew a line through each of them.
The dots on the answer grid were all accounted for, if inverted.
Again, even if an AI attempted to draw something with dots it would
generally be variations on something visibly similar, not taking the
leap to highlight the negative space instead.
As he filled in the
dots, the short addresses for a numbers of sites he was already
familiar with popped up every few dots. The browser saw them and
tried to ‘helpfully’ expand and preload the sites, prompting Arlo
when they were ready. Arlo wasn’t sure if it was a random thing or
something to do with the pattern he entered. He undid a few spaces
and saw that it was a mathematical formula that spit out Compact
addresses.
With the full dot
pattern tediously entered in, the website finally stopped attempting
to redirect the page to somewhere plain, mostly message boards he
made a point of commenting on. He realized the AI scanning the
page, if it ever got this far, would probably classify the page as a
random puzzle or address checker. The chances of anyone getting
the correct dot pattern, other than from the card, was vanishingly
small.
A bright warning
appeared on the screen. “The page you are navigating to has not
been indexed. Did you want to submit it?” He knew that clicking
either answer would flag it in the system and record his previous
mouse and keyboard use. Arlo noted the amount of work and Anti-AI
obstacles in getting to the page. Rather than choosing an answer, he
let the warning time out, like it was an accidental page opening.
He finally got to
the proper page of the Reboot project and saw what it was about.
It noted that much
of the old hardware from before the Event was starting to break down,
and there was a small window where new systems were being designed.
These new systems could either be made to load the old software or
redesigned for something fresh. The old software was based on shaky
iterations of ancient legacy code, code that had thousands of bugs
and assumptions baked in. A new machine language could be started
fresh, that took existing knowledge and reflections and designed from
scratch. Since the Event, minds had sharpened and already seemed
primed for new tasks.
On the other hand,
the main Council had generally decided that people had seen enough of
an upheaval already, and didn’t see a point in “fixing what
wasn’t broken”. The benefits to a new, ground up, approach were
too many to list, but unfortunately something that could easily be
bogged down by committee. By the time the administrative groups had
decided on what was needed, the manufacturing of hardware would
already be in place. Since things were now being built to last, even
these first generation devices could be usable for quite a while, and
replacement parts and future work would all be centred around them.
If that foundation was essential designed to run legacy software,
they would be trapped in that ecosystem. New ideas and methods would
have to be bolted on, and forced to be bottle necked though the
legacy code.
Arlo had already had
experience writing the basic controller code for the lower tech
appliances, so a whole Operating System, even based on an entirely
new Machine Code wasn’t something that was out of his reach.
Making something from scratch meant that just about everyone would be
a novice anyway, so he couldn’t think of too many people more
qualified.
In fact, a section
of the site seemed to be dedicated already to MakerProof code, as a
kind of testbed to designing things from scratch. It seemed that
Arlo was reading the history section of the project, rather than the
current information. Things weren’t loading the way they normally
would, but Arlo noted a link at the bottom of the page listing a
MakerProof browser. He downloaded it and installed it. The homepage
was set to the Reboot directory and everything seemed to run
smoother. He could navigate more freely through the information as
the pages dynamically sorted based on his searches within the
document. He thought going to the current members might be a good
way to organize the information and see what was currently happening.
Arlo looked through
the list of people already involved with the project and recognized a
few people from the manufacturing side of the Maker kits, as well as
Terrance – listed only as ‘Recruitment’. Arlo himself was
already listed as Lead Programmer, even though he hadn’t yet agreed
to anything. Not that he didn’t want to join, but he expected some
kind of formal interview for the project. He realized the links to
the message board weren’t just there for his benefit, but listed
most of the people involved in the project so far. They were the
recruitment, and seemly acceptance, of the project, even though it
was never discussed in concrete terms anywhere outside of this
evenings hushed dialogue.
At least if the
manufacturing people he knew were in on this project, they wouldn’t
push out too many legacy devices out until they had to. That meant
there was a controllable gap where new hardware could be designed and
code written for it.
Arlo dug further
into the pages and found that much of the work had already been done,
at least in terms of the raw capabilities and general architecture of
the new tablets. Arlo noted, with some pride, that the basic
functions were being run by MakerProof code. That wasn’t strictly
within the original scope of the language he had written, but initial
tests showed that it scaled up better than legacy code.
For the moment
though, the machines were better described as ‘all in one’
devices rather than true computers. Most of the true calculations
were actually offloaded into larger hardware on the network, making
the tablets more like remote keyboards. There was a small asterisk
near the end of the design specs page, linking to a discussion on the
goals of the project and how distributing computing might work.
