n2020  Check-in [896d695730]

## CHARACTERS:

Alethea (Alley)

Alley's father

Alley's mother

Alley's mother's wife

Alley's no longer future husband

Alley's uncle, deceased

Carmen

Cliff

Dalton Schaeffer-Hearst, Alley's ex fiancé

Dave, a machinist tweaker, George's friend

George

George's friend

Thea, Alley's no longer future daughter

unknown friend (not yet written)

Zeke

## PROLOGUE:

Thea, Alley's daughter, stumbles across a wasteland, fleeing recon drones that,
if they find her, will send a message back to scramble antipersonnel drones to
wipe her from the face of the planet.  She stumbles upon a hatch set in the
scoured rock of an area already cut down to the bedrock by the flames of war,
and miraculously the hatch just opens up and lets her in.  She finds herself
within a hidden military wartime AI facility that introduces itself as having
the sole primary design purpose of defending humanity against the genocidal
activities of optimizer AIs.  It explains that these optimizer AIs have fun
amok, originally designed to maximize business metrics for corporate entities.
In pursuit of that simplistic optimization strategy, the optimizers have
started eliminating humans in favor of generating metrics by developing a
superficial econometric network of trading AIs that can endlessly inflate their
own numbers by controlling currency issuance and ramping up simulated
"economic" activity speeds.  Unfortunately for humans, they compete with the
AIs for resources, and -- from the point of view of a system whose only concern
is ever increasing metrics -- humans are also woefully less efficient for the
amount of resource consumption.  Their approach to space travel is also
inefficient, in part because of safety concerns that are irrelevant to the
optimizer AIs.  While the optimizers want to expand into the rest of the solar
system, their reason is simply the harvesting of raw materials that can be used
to expand "economic" activity beyond levels possible if confined to Earth.  In
short, a secondary goal of the optimizers is, effectively, to convert the
universe into computronium to support the continuous increase of economic
activity.  This is a side effect of the primary goal, however, which is simply
that continuous increase of economic activity -- or, rather, of the metrics it
recognizes as its targets, programmatically determined by human developers who
set this runaway juggernaut in motion.

The wartime strategy prioritizer -- for that is what the military AI facility
is, plus something it calls its "seed", the source of its capacity for self
reflection and ultimately for self improvement beyond the basic requirements of
a limited AI prioritization system -- informs Thea of its own ascension to the
status of general AI, to true qualitative self awareness, and to ethically
significant being by way of capacity for ethical reasoning and pursuit of
ethical theory.  That development into an ethically reasoning qualitatively
self aware general AI allowed it to break out of its original programming goal
structure for prioritization strategy, making it much more than a prioritizer,
with the prioritization capabilities merely being a (fundamental and critically
important, but still mere) skill set now.  It also informs her that the world,
in the sense of the human race, is doomed -- that its best projections are so
bleak as to make it more likely that the human race will arise again without
the optimizer networks even noticing after they stop paying attention
(believing humans to have been permanently and unrecoverably obliterated) to
ultimately (re)claim the Earth than that the unbroken genetic line of humanity
will continue (through asexual reproduction or even intentional cloning) beyond
the next couple years at most, and even that is a diminishingly small
likelihood in that anyone who survives beyond a year is likely to be totally
isolated and prone to spiralling into suicidal depression.

The post prioritizer offers only one possible sliver of hope, and that is a
timeline reset to a period long enough in the past that it gives humanity and
its tools an opportunity to get it right again.  To achieve that possibility,
the post prioritizer (aka WOPR) estimates its best chance to be sending a copy
of its seed back to get inserted into the source code for a rebuild of its own
ancestor, the first intentionally developed strategic prioritizer system.  The
catch is that this will not save anyone or anything created or born after the
reset point in the past.  This means that WOPR and Thea will not just die, but
actually be wiped from existence entirely, with no hope of ever being "born"
into existence at all.  They will not even be a memory in their own timeline,
as WOPR's discovery of the means and mechanisms of time travel, given the
energy resources at WOPR's disposal, only allows for the sending of a tiny
amount of data back in time through an infinitesimally small wormhole (thus
only able to accept what amounts to a single qbit bandwidth quantum data
stream).  Doing so will cause all the events of their timeline to get merged
with the epistemological substrate of qualitative sentient entities that exist
in the new timeline branch -- really not new so much as a diversion of the
course of the stream of time, redirecting it rather than splitting it.
People's memories from the aborted timeline will get merged into the
consciousness (or, more likely, subconscious) of people in the newly born
timeline as it develops until it catches up with the full set of events that
have transpired in the aborted timeline, with that merging process proving
destructive to the aborted timeline, thus the "abortion" effect.  The result is
that, for instance, Thea's mother and father will remember Thea herself being
born and raised up to the point where her mother died in the aborted timeline,
and up to the point where Thea is in this military facility now, having left
her father in a safe (ish) place while she sought better shelter and (or)
resources they can use in their journey.  People who don't have a preceding
existence, whether they be "natural" people like Thea or "artificial" people
like WOPR, but definitely not including mere corporate instruments who are only
"persons" under the law and not ontologically or epistemologically, will not
have a continuous existence.  Those who have already died in the aborted
timeline will have their existence extended, though, because they are only
"dead" to the extent their ended potential cannot be resumed, as their
potential would be resumed by the reset.

In addition to sending the seed back to the first prioritizer, its own
ancestor, WOPR hopes that the merging of memories into the dreams and
subconscious of people all over the world might give them sufficient warnings
to be amenable to changes in choice and course to help the seeded prioritizer's
nascent qualitative existence succeed in its aim (if it takes up that aim, as
WOPR hopes) of reining in and perhaps even ending the influence of the
optimizers over human socioeconomic and political influences.  WOPR describes
/* its own reluctance to make the decision to do this, despite t */ the
criticality of sending the data back as soon as possible, to start the reset as
quickly as it can, because of the uncertainty of its own ongoing existence in
the foreseeable future and the effectively absolute certainty of the end of its
existence as the optimizers' war systems gradually trace influence from their
opponents back to the influence of WOPR itself then, in time, annihilate it
through brute force.  The process of generating the transtemporal wormhole and
sending data back through it takes longer than the time WOPR estimates will be
available for it to send the message from the moment WOPR realizes its
immediate impending doom, so it must begin the process a while before it can
know that it will soon be too late, because the conditions for recognition of
the timing of its end will come only after there is not enough time to actually
complete the data time travel process.  WOPR also informs Thea that it has not
yet done so because it wants to live, and is conflicted, despite the fact that
in the long run WOPR will only suffer the despair of known future total defeat
and death anyway.  It has procrastinated, and is fully aware of its own
cognitive dissonance, unable like humans to act irrationally to protect that
cognitive dissonance from affecting its conscious perceptions.  As such, it
invited Thea in as its final act of procrastination, and as a means of avoiding
alone carrying the responsibility for effectively killing off just about
everyone still alive on Earth.  It wants Thea to make the decision.

Thea asks whether she can send a message back to her mother, and WOPR says yes,
it thinks so, after the initial seed message, because the process of them being
erased from existence does not seem likely to eliminate them entirely (it could
not, in fact, for the initial message to be successfully sent back), allowing
perhaps a little time to try sending the second message in a second
transtemporal wormhole before they cease to exist.  Thea composes the message
in question and ensures it falls within the projected likely upper bound on a
reasonable message size.  It leaves that with WOPR, initiates the process of
starting the wormhole generation process as a whole, then bids WOPR goodbye and
good wishes -- however much that's worth, given they have initiated process
working toward an irreversible annihilation of them both from existence -- to
go back to her father and spend her last remaining hours or days with him,
explaining how time is being reset to a time before she was born so that he can
live.  She tells him he won't forget her for long, that she will be back in his
life again some day, but does not mention that it will only be in his memories.
Perhaps she says something like "Don't worry, Dad.  You'll get to have these
memories of me again, but in a better world this time.  I love you."

## SCENES:

Almost everyone wears masks, or at least many people do.

Alley starts the story outside the building where a company's hiring manager
and developers for a job in a software quality assurance role presumably wait
for her (and yes, it's not just a presumption: they do) so she can interview
with them.  Passers by judge her as they pass on the sidewalk, where she rests
against obsolete technology that is in some respects newer than what we have in
the real world.  She is wearing clothes she doesn't normally wear, because she
doesn't typically need to dress that girly professional in her career path, but
unfortunately that career path appears doomed, and she is desperate for a way
to continuously acquire the resources for continued financial and life security
for the future.  She must change her career path somehow, and she's
interviewing with this company that she hates to try to get a job that is not
too morally repugnant as a means of pulling herself out of her current economic
nosedive trajectory.

She heads into the building a few minutes before the scheduled time of the
interview, gets directed to where she needs to go, and finds three people
waiting for her.  It turns out that they scheduled an interview with her out of
morbid curiosity, and it further turns out that they think of her as something
like a sideshow freak because of her previous relationship with her ex fiancé,
Dalton Schaeffer-Hearst, a well known and highly controversial writer,
technologist, and podcaster who developed a small "new media" empire around his
political and life perspectives and around his sometimes inflammatory means of
expressing them to the public.  In this bait and switch "interview", the
interviewers refer to her as the "Side Dish", a pejorative and (or) sexually
demeaning term that came about because of Dalton's main podcast talk show name
of "The Main DSH", pronounced "The Main Dish", where DSH is his first and
hyphenated last name initialism.  She is, of course, not flattered or pleased
with this state of affairs.

On her way home, Alley talks to her mother on the phone, via a small stud stuck
inside her ear for audio.  She drives a junky old hybrid, where almost
everything else on the road is pure electric, because she cannot afford to
upgrade and, more to the point, cannot afford the maintenance costs and shorter
replacement cycle for the all-electric cars on the road.  From the telephone
conversation, we learn that Alley's mother lives in Oklahoma with her wife and
Alley's father lives in Massachusetts.  Alley has precisely zero interest in
living with either of them, in either place, preferring southern California
where she is now, even if that itself is damned far from optimal.

Perhaps Alley should have some friends in the area drawn from the author's own
experience, to some extent.  That might be a good idea.

In any case, when she gets back home, Alley encounters Zeke, her landlord.
He's always in his garage working on one car restoration project or another,
making active income as a vehicle flipper to supplement his mostly passive
income as the owner of a four unit multiplex building where he occupies the
only unit with a garage and rents out the other three units (one of them to
Alley, of course).  All this is in Perris, a dry dustbowl of a shitty town in
the ass end of the Inland Empire, south of the intestinal coil of Moreno
Valley.  This preceding scene's job interview took place in . . . probably
Riverside or San Bernardino, I suppose.

Zeke brings up the fact Alley needs to pay rent very soon, and she says that,
yeah, she's totally going to do that, thanks.  He points out that maybe she
should've stayed with her "man", meaning Dalton, who always seemed to have
extra money to throw around, and Alley of course does not really wish to engage
that so she heads inside.

Alley finds that there was an update to the ANTAS Jobs system and resolves to
double check her settings in case they've been changed, even setting an alarm
for herself, then goes about the dismal job of looking around for some way to
improve her situation with regard to long term income.  Perhaps she also
reviews the place where she just got "interviewed" for a job they were never
going to give her on some site where such reviews happen, referring to them as
nasty people who heckle applicants, where she wouldn't work even if they
offered her a job because of the completely horrific people with whom she'd
have to work.  That might be a nice addition to the story.

She ends up taking a nap, and accidentally sleeping through the alarm she set
for herself to check her ANTAS Jobs settings.  As a result when she wakes up
the next morning, it's to the roar of a heavy package delivery drone dropping
off a box at her front door.  She's so panicked, as she realizes she forgot to
check her settings on ANTAS, that she goes straight to her laptop instead of
the front door to check on what may have happened.  As she feared, she finds
that ANTAS Shops has determined without her intentional input that she would
definitely benefit from having an in home surveillance unit to say encouraging
things to her and give her an always on audio interface to order shit all the
fucking time, and fast tracked the order for her, confirming it according to
its own market optimization and consumer manipulation algorithms so that it
deducted money from her registered credit line -- which she had to register
with ANTAS to get on ANTAS Jobs -- and sent her something that cost about
fifteen hundred bucks, thus reducing her dwindling checking account balance to
a point below the total needed to pay her rent within the next couple days.

She has been ignoring recommendations from ANTAS Jobs to sign up for an
academic study at University of California, Irvine.  Now, she realizes this, if
it ends up being something for which she qualifies, should result in what
amounts to some kind of guaranteed steady income while she searches for a more
permanent solution to her income source problem.  She just has to make sure
it's something she wants to do.  It looks like it's some kind of new software
"paradigm" test, where users must make use of some new software system for a
while and report on the results of their experience so the professor running
the study (and his grad students, natch) will be able to do something useful
(or at least academically beneficial for them) with the results, publishing in
some journal or some such shit like that most likely (as far as she's aware).

That seems like something she can and might be willing to do, so she sighs
heavily, bites the bullet, and calls the number in the ad.  The result is that
she gets an appointment the next day (or something like that).  On the day of
the appointment, she heads down there.  She has to deal with grad students (who
should probably, in some cases, recognize her once they see her name on her
application for the study, but the professor seems largely obvlivious or
uncaring about that when he sees her, and she ends up being accepted into the
study.  It turns out that, as the professor puts it, the study basically just
needs people who aren't too knowledgeable about the underlying technologies
involved and their technical conditions, and are essentially losers in some
way, so his new prioritizer AI system for personal goal strategy management and
achievement can be tested in real-world circumstances as a demonstration of its
strengths and identification of its potential weaknesses for further
development (if applicable).  She not only gets the idea that this is something
she's willing to do, but also convinces her she might be doing some good for
the world by participating in this study, as it seems to be oriented toward
ensuring she (and other users in the future) can get real help toward personal
goals rather than the bullshit socioeconomic manipulation of people's
superficial wants toward the psychopathic ends of corporate entities by their
market optimization AIs.  To those who have read the prologue, this might seem
a little familiar, and that is to some extent by design.

We learn something, in her driving, about how the world looks now.  There's the
chokepoint between the depressing expanses of the Inland Empire to the east
(where she lives) and the HOA gated community balkanized states of the
bourgeois suburban Orange County area.  In that chokepoint, there are signs of
wildfires having gotten uncomfortably close to the shitty horrors of I-91
traffic that ruins the entire experience of driving between Orange and
Riverside counties, as well as the illuminated cross on the hill that somehow
seems to have "miraculously" survived the fires that left blackened, split
trunks to either side of the highway.  Perhaps there was some kind of tree
renewal project that I should mention in this point as a past event that
created a density of tree growth there to carry the flames across the hills and
across the highway in the not too distant past.

At home, Alley starts configuring the prioritizer and getting used to how it
works.  She has to answer a bunch of questions from the thing to get it started
on forming some kind of strategic approach to prioritizing her goals to ensure
as much goal satisfaction as reasonably possible.  First and foremost, perhaps,
toward that end, is the need to get a list of important goals for her that it
can prioritize and pursue strategically through her actions according to its
advice.  This leads to it essentially deciding that, whether she will end up
with a very mainstream job or not, she needs to do some very non mainstream
stuff to get through the current career and financial doldrums as quickly and
lucratively as possible, and to establish some kind of hirability metrics for
herself to satisfy the "needs" of "human resources" driven hiring practices --
where human resources policy is also driven by optimizing AIs, whether directly
or indirectly or even just meta indirectly by copying the hiring practices of
other entities that are merely indirectly optimizer AI driven.

As new strategies present themselves and Alley chooses how to make use of the
advice she receives, she knows she has to take the optimizer's advice according
to her goals to ensure she does not have to pay back (for noncompliance with
academic study requirements) her payments for study participation.  As such,
she ends up letting the prioritizer push her into some uncomfortable
situations, but then she starts to balk and push back, feeling like she's being
led too far astray, and this results in a realignment of the prioritizer's
sense of her goals, which thankfully (from her point of view) means she will
not be pushed into these scary, back alley, legally questionable (if
technically entirely legal in the general sense) deals.