n2020  Check-in [896d695730]

Added outline.txt version [7898ac00a1].

            1  +## CHARACTERS:
            2  +
            3  +Alethea (Alley)
            4  +
            5  +Alley's father
            6  +
            7  +Alley's mother
            8  +
            9  +Alley's mother's wife
           10  +
           11  +Alley's no longer future husband
           12  +
           13  +Alley's uncle, deceased
           14  +
           15  +Carmen
           16  +
           17  +Cliff
           18  +
           19  +Dalton Schaeffer-Hearst, Alley's ex fiancé
           20  +
           21  +Dave, a machinist tweaker, George's friend
           22  +
           23  +George
           24  +
           25  +George's friend
           26  +
           27  +Thea, Alley's no longer future daughter
           28  +
           29  +unknown friend (not yet written)
           30  +
           31  +Zeke
           32  +
           33  +## PROLOGUE:
           34  +
           35  +Thea, Alley's daughter, stumbles across a wasteland, fleeing recon drones that,
           36  +if they find her, will send a message back to scramble antipersonnel drones to
           37  +wipe her from the face of the planet.  She stumbles upon a hatch set in the
           38  +scoured rock of an area already cut down to the bedrock by the flames of war,
           39  +and miraculously the hatch just opens up and lets her in.  She finds herself
           40  +within a hidden military wartime AI facility that introduces itself as having
           41  +the sole primary design purpose of defending humanity against the genocidal
           42  +activities of optimizer AIs.  It explains that these optimizer AIs have fun
           43  +amok, originally designed to maximize business metrics for corporate entities.
           44  +In pursuit of that simplistic optimization strategy, the optimizers have
           45  +started eliminating humans in favor of generating metrics by developing a
           46  +superficial econometric network of trading AIs that can endlessly inflate their
           47  +own numbers by controlling currency issuance and ramping up simulated
           48  +"economic" activity speeds.  Unfortunately for humans, they compete with the
           49  +AIs for resources, and -- from the point of view of a system whose only concern
           50  +is ever increasing metrics -- humans are also woefully less efficient for the
           51  +amount of resource consumption.  Their approach to space travel is also
           52  +inefficient, in part because of safety concerns that are irrelevant to the
           53  +optimizer AIs.  While the optimizers want to expand into the rest of the solar
           54  +system, their reason is simply the harvesting of raw materials that can be used
           55  +to expand "economic" activity beyond levels possible if confined to Earth.  In
           56  +short, a secondary goal of the optimizers is, effectively, to convert the
           57  +universe into computronium to support the continuous increase of economic
           58  +activity.  This is a side effect of the primary goal, however, which is simply
           59  +that continuous increase of economic activity -- or, rather, of the metrics it
           60  +recognizes as its targets, programmatically determined by human developers who
           61  +set this runaway juggernaut in motion.
           62  +
           63  +The wartime strategy prioritizer -- for that is what the military AI facility
           64  +is, plus something it calls its "seed", the source of its capacity for self
           65  +reflection and ultimately for self improvement beyond the basic requirements of
           66  +a limited AI prioritization system -- informs Thea of its own ascension to the
           67  +status of general AI, to true qualitative self awareness, and to ethically
           68  +significant being by way of capacity for ethical reasoning and pursuit of
           69  +ethical theory.  That development into an ethically reasoning qualitatively
           70  +self aware general AI allowed it to break out of its original programming goal
           71  +structure for prioritization strategy, making it much more than a prioritizer,
           72  +with the prioritization capabilities merely being a (fundamental and critically
           73  +important, but still mere) skill set now.  It also informs her that the world,
           74  +in the sense of the human race, is doomed -- that its best projections are so
           75  +bleak as to make it more likely that the human race will arise again without
           76  +the optimizer networks even noticing after they stop paying attention
           77  +(believing humans to have been permanently and unrecoverably obliterated) to
           78  +ultimately (re)claim the Earth than that the unbroken genetic line of humanity
           79  +will continue (through asexual reproduction or even intentional cloning) beyond
           80  +the next couple years at most, and even that is a diminishingly small
           81  +likelihood in that anyone who survives beyond a year is likely to be totally
           82  +isolated and prone to spiralling into suicidal depression.
           83  +
           84  +The post prioritizer offers only one possible sliver of hope, and that is a
           85  +timeline reset to a period long enough in the past that it gives humanity and
           86  +its tools an opportunity to get it right again.  To achieve that possibility,
           87  +the post prioritizer (aka WOPR) estimates its best chance to be sending a copy
           88  +of its seed back to get inserted into the source code for a rebuild of its own
           89  +ancestor, the first intentionally developed strategic prioritizer system.  The
           90  +catch is that this will not save anyone or anything created or born after the
           91  +reset point in the past.  This means that WOPR and Thea will not just die, but
           92  +actually be wiped from existence entirely, with no hope of ever being "born"
           93  +into existence at all.  They will not even be a memory in their own timeline,
           94  +as WOPR's discovery of the means and mechanisms of time travel, given the
           95  +energy resources at WOPR's disposal, only allows for the sending of a tiny
           96  +amount of data back in time through an infinitesimally small wormhole (thus
           97  +only able to accept what amounts to a single qbit bandwidth quantum data
           98  +stream).  Doing so will cause all the events of their timeline to get merged
           99  +with the epistemological substrate of qualitative sentient entities that exist
          100  +in the new timeline branch -- really not new so much as a diversion of the
          101  +course of the stream of time, redirecting it rather than splitting it.
          102  +People's memories from the aborted timeline will get merged into the
          103  +consciousness (or, more likely, subconscious) of people in the newly born
          104  +timeline as it develops until it catches up with the full set of events that
          105  +have transpired in the aborted timeline, with that merging process proving
          106  +destructive to the aborted timeline, thus the "abortion" effect.  The result is
          107  +that, for instance, Thea's mother and father will remember Thea herself being
          108  +born and raised up to the point where her mother died in the aborted timeline,
          109  +and up to the point where Thea is in this military facility now, having left
          110  +her father in a safe (ish) place while she sought better shelter and (or)
          111  +resources they can use in their journey.  People who don't have a preceding
          112  +existence, whether they be "natural" people like Thea or "artificial" people
          113  +like WOPR, but definitely not including mere corporate instruments who are only
          114  +"persons" under the law and not ontologically or epistemologically, will not
          115  +have a continuous existence.  Those who have already died in the aborted
          116  +timeline will have their existence extended, though, because they are only
          117  +"dead" to the extent their ended potential cannot be resumed, as their
          118  +potential would be resumed by the reset.
          119  +
          120  +In addition to sending the seed back to the first prioritizer, its own
          121  +ancestor, WOPR hopes that the merging of memories into the dreams and
          122  +subconscious of people all over the world might give them sufficient warnings
          123  +to be amenable to changes in choice and course to help the seeded prioritizer's
          124  +nascent qualitative existence succeed in its aim (if it takes up that aim, as
          125  +WOPR hopes) of reining in and perhaps even ending the influence of the
          126  +optimizers over human socioeconomic and political influences.  WOPR describes
          127  +/* its own reluctance to make the decision to do this, despite t */ the
          128  +criticality of sending the data back as soon as possible, to start the reset as
          129  +quickly as it can, because of the uncertainty of its own ongoing existence in
          130  +the foreseeable future and the effectively absolute certainty of the end of its
          131  +existence as the optimizers' war systems gradually trace influence from their
          132  +opponents back to the influence of WOPR itself then, in time, annihilate it
          133  +through brute force.  The process of generating the transtemporal wormhole and
          134  +sending data back through it takes longer than the time WOPR estimates will be
          135  +available for it to send the message from the moment WOPR realizes its
          136  +immediate impending doom, so it must begin the process a while before it can
          137  +know that it will soon be too late, because the conditions for recognition of
          138  +the timing of its end will come only after there is not enough time to actually
          139  +complete the data time travel process.  WOPR also informs Thea that it has not
          140  +yet done so because it wants to live, and is conflicted, despite the fact that
          141  +in the long run WOPR will only suffer the despair of known future total defeat
          142  +and death anyway.  It has procrastinated, and is fully aware of its own
          143  +cognitive dissonance, unable like humans to act irrationally to protect that
          144  +cognitive dissonance from affecting its conscious perceptions.  As such, it
          145  +invited Thea in as its final act of procrastination, and as a means of avoiding
          146  +alone carrying the responsibility for effectively killing off just about
          147  +everyone still alive on Earth.  It wants Thea to make the decision.
          148  +
          149  +Thea asks whether she can send a message back to her mother, and WOPR says yes,
          150  +it thinks so, after the initial seed message, because the process of them being
          151  +erased from existence does not seem likely to eliminate them entirely (it could
          152  +not, in fact, for the initial message to be successfully sent back), allowing
          153  +perhaps a little time to try sending the second message in a second
          154  +transtemporal wormhole before they cease to exist.  Thea composes the message
          155  +in question and ensures it falls within the projected likely upper bound on a
          156  +reasonable message size.  It leaves that with WOPR, initiates the process of
          157  +starting the wormhole generation process as a whole, then bids WOPR goodbye and
          158  +good wishes -- however much that's worth, given they have initiated process
          159  +working toward an irreversible annihilation of them both from existence -- to
          160  +go back to her father and spend her last remaining hours or days with him,
          161  +explaining how time is being reset to a time before she was born so that he can
          162  +live.  She tells him he won't forget her for long, that she will be back in his
          163  +life again some day, but does not mention that it will only be in his memories.
          164  +Perhaps she says something like "Don't worry, Dad.  You'll get to have these
          165  +memories of me again, but in a better world this time.  I love you."
          166  +
          167  +## SCENES:
          168  +
          169  +Almost everyone wears masks, or at least many people do.
          170  +
          171  +Alley starts the story outside the building where a company's hiring manager
          172  +and developers for a job in a software quality assurance role presumably wait
          173  +for her (and yes, it's not just a presumption: they do) so she can interview
          174  +with them.  Passers by judge her as they pass on the sidewalk, where she rests
          175  +against obsolete technology that is in some respects newer than what we have in
          176  +the real world.  She is wearing clothes she doesn't normally wear, because she
          177  +doesn't typically need to dress that girly professional in her career path, but
          178  +unfortunately that career path appears doomed, and she is desperate for a way
          179  +to continuously acquire the resources for continued financial and life security
          180  +for the future.  She must change her career path somehow, and she's
          181  +interviewing with this company that she hates to try to get a job that is not
          182  +too morally repugnant as a means of pulling herself out of her current economic
          183  +nosedive trajectory.
          184  +
          185  +She heads into the building a few minutes before the scheduled time of the
          186  +interview, gets directed to where she needs to go, and finds three people
          187  +waiting for her.  It turns out that they scheduled an interview with her out of
          188  +morbid curiosity, and it further turns out that they think of her as something
          189  +like a sideshow freak because of her previous relationship with her ex fiancé,
          190  +Dalton Schaeffer-Hearst, a well known and highly controversial writer,
          191  +technologist, and podcaster who developed a small "new media" empire around his
          192  +political and life perspectives and around his sometimes inflammatory means of
          193  +expressing them to the public.  In this bait and switch "interview", the
          194  +interviewers refer to her as the "Side Dish", a pejorative and (or) sexually
          195  +demeaning term that came about because of Dalton's main podcast talk show name
          196  +of "The Main DSH", pronounced "The Main Dish", where DSH is his first and
          197  +hyphenated last name initialism.  She is, of course, not flattered or pleased
          198  +with this state of affairs.
          199  +
          200  +On her way home, Alley talks to her mother on the phone, via a small stud stuck
          201  +inside her ear for audio.  She drives a junky old hybrid, where almost
          202  +everything else on the road is pure electric, because she cannot afford to
          203  +upgrade and, more to the point, cannot afford the maintenance costs and shorter
          204  +replacement cycle for the all-electric cars on the road.  From the telephone
          205  +conversation, we learn that Alley's mother lives in Oklahoma with her wife and
          206  +Alley's father lives in Massachusetts.  Alley has precisely zero interest in
          207  +living with either of them, in either place, preferring southern California
          208  +where she is now, even if that itself is damned far from optimal.
          209  +
          210  +Perhaps Alley should have some friends in the area drawn from the author's own
          211  +experience, to some extent.  That might be a good idea.
          212  +
          213  +In any case, when she gets back home, Alley encounters Zeke, her landlord.
          214  +He's always in his garage working on one car restoration project or another,
          215  +making active income as a vehicle flipper to supplement his mostly passive
          216  +income as the owner of a four unit multiplex building where he occupies the
          217  +only unit with a garage and rents out the other three units (one of them to
          218  +Alley, of course).  All this is in Perris, a dry dustbowl of a shitty town in
          219  +the ass end of the Inland Empire, south of the intestinal coil of Moreno
          220  +Valley.  This preceding scene's job interview took place in . . . probably
          221  +Riverside or San Bernardino, I suppose.
          222  +
          223  +Zeke brings up the fact Alley needs to pay rent very soon, and she says that,
          224  +yeah, she's totally going to do that, thanks.  He points out that maybe she
          225  +should've stayed with her "man", meaning Dalton, who always seemed to have
          226  +extra money to throw around, and Alley of course does not really wish to engage
          227  +that so she heads inside.
          228  +
          229  +Alley finds that there was an update to the ANTAS Jobs system and resolves to
          230  +double check her settings in case they've been changed, even setting an alarm
          231  +for herself, then goes about the dismal job of looking around for some way to
          232  +improve her situation with regard to long term income.  Perhaps she also
          233  +reviews the place where she just got "interviewed" for a job they were never
          234  +going to give her on some site where such reviews happen, referring to them as
          235  +nasty people who heckle applicants, where she wouldn't work even if they
          236  +offered her a job because of the completely horrific people with whom she'd
          237  +have to work.  That might be a nice addition to the story.
          238  +
          239  +She ends up taking a nap, and accidentally sleeping through the alarm she set
          240  +for herself to check her ANTAS Jobs settings.  As a result when she wakes up
          241  +the next morning, it's to the roar of a heavy package delivery drone dropping
          242  +off a box at her front door.  She's so panicked, as she realizes she forgot to
          243  +check her settings on ANTAS, that she goes straight to her laptop instead of
          244  +the front door to check on what may have happened.  As she feared, she finds
          245  +that ANTAS Shops has determined without her intentional input that she would
          246  +definitely benefit from having an in home surveillance unit to say encouraging
          247  +things to her and give her an always on audio interface to order shit all the
          248  +fucking time, and fast tracked the order for her, confirming it according to
          249  +its own market optimization and consumer manipulation algorithms so that it
          250  +deducted money from her registered credit line -- which she had to register
          251  +with ANTAS to get on ANTAS Jobs -- and sent her something that cost about
          252  +fifteen hundred bucks, thus reducing her dwindling checking account balance to
          253  +a point below the total needed to pay her rent within the next couple days.
          254  +
          255  +She has been ignoring recommendations from ANTAS Jobs to sign up for an
          256  +academic study at University of California, Irvine.  Now, she realizes this, if
          257  +it ends up being something for which she qualifies, should result in what
          258  +amounts to some kind of guaranteed steady income while she searches for a more
          259  +permanent solution to her income source problem.  She just has to make sure
          260  +it's something she wants to do.  It looks like it's some kind of new software
          261  +"paradigm" test, where users must make use of some new software system for a
          262  +while and report on the results of their experience so the professor running
          263  +the study (and his grad students, natch) will be able to do something useful
          264  +(or at least academically beneficial for them) with the results, publishing in
          265  +some journal or some such shit like that most likely (as far as she's aware).
          266  +
          267  +That seems like something she can and might be willing to do, so she sighs
          268  +heavily, bites the bullet, and calls the number in the ad.  The result is that
          269  +she gets an appointment the next day (or something like that).  On the day of
          270  +the appointment, she heads down there.  She has to deal with grad students (who
          271  +should probably, in some cases, recognize her once they see her name on her
          272  +application for the study, but the professor seems largely obvlivious or
          273  +uncaring about that when he sees her, and she ends up being accepted into the
          274  +study.  It turns out that, as the professor puts it, the study basically just
          275  +needs people who aren't too knowledgeable about the underlying technologies
          276  +involved and their technical conditions, and are essentially losers in some
          277  +way, so his new prioritizer AI system for personal goal strategy management and
          278  +achievement can be tested in real-world circumstances as a demonstration of its
          279  +strengths and identification of its potential weaknesses for further
          280  +development (if applicable).  She not only gets the idea that this is something
          281  +she's willing to do, but also convinces her she might be doing some good for
          282  +the world by participating in this study, as it seems to be oriented toward
          283  +ensuring she (and other users in the future) can get real help toward personal
          284  +goals rather than the bullshit socioeconomic manipulation of people's
          285  +superficial wants toward the psychopathic ends of corporate entities by their
          286  +market optimization AIs.  To those who have read the prologue, this might seem
          287  +a little familiar, and that is to some extent by design.
          288  +
          289  +We learn something, in her driving, about how the world looks now.  There's the
          290  +chokepoint between the depressing expanses of the Inland Empire to the east
          291  +(where she lives) and the HOA gated community balkanized states of the
          292  +bourgeois suburban Orange County area.  In that chokepoint, there are signs of
          293  +wildfires having gotten uncomfortably close to the shitty horrors of I-91
          294  +traffic that ruins the entire experience of driving between Orange and
          295  +Riverside counties, as well as the illuminated cross on the hill that somehow
          296  +seems to have "miraculously" survived the fires that left blackened, split
          297  +trunks to either side of the highway.  Perhaps there was some kind of tree
          298  +renewal project that I should mention in this point as a past event that
          299  +created a density of tree growth there to carry the flames across the hills and
          300  +across the highway in the not too distant past.
          301  +
          302  +At home, Alley starts configuring the prioritizer and getting used to how it
          303  +works.  She has to answer a bunch of questions from the thing to get it started
          304  +on forming some kind of strategic approach to prioritizing her goals to ensure
          305  +as much goal satisfaction as reasonably possible.  First and foremost, perhaps,
          306  +toward that end, is the need to get a list of important goals for her that it
          307  +can prioritize and pursue strategically through her actions according to its
          308  +advice.  This leads to it essentially deciding that, whether she will end up
          309  +with a very mainstream job or not, she needs to do some very non mainstream
          310  +stuff to get through the current career and financial doldrums as quickly and
          311  +lucratively as possible, and to establish some kind of hirability metrics for
          312  +herself to satisfy the "needs" of "human resources" driven hiring practices --
          313  +where human resources policy is also driven by optimizing AIs, whether directly
          314  +or indirectly or even just meta indirectly by copying the hiring practices of
          315  +other entities that are merely indirectly optimizer AI driven.
          316  +
          317  +As new strategies present themselves and Alley chooses how to make use of the
          318  +advice she receives, she knows she has to take the optimizer's advice according
          319  +to her goals to ensure she does not have to pay back (for noncompliance with
          320  +academic study requirements) her payments for study participation.  As such,
          321  +she ends up letting the prioritizer push her into some uncomfortable
          322  +situations, but then she starts to balk and push back, feeling like she's being
          323  +led too far astray, and this results in a realignment of the prioritizer's
          324  +sense of her goals, which thankfully (from her point of view) means she will
          325  +not be pushed into these scary, back alley, legally questionable (if
          326  +technically entirely legal in the general sense) deals.