Part four! Enjoy!
Ghosts
Vlad’s office was, as usual, in a state of complete disarray. Another significant difference between Fatima and Vlad. Where she had been interested in creating an orderly environment, Vlad had embraced the chaos. It was remarkable to Alfred that Vlad could determine what was and wasn’t useful for whatever task he wanted to complete.
Alfred walked in through the open door of Vlad’s office, accidentally stepping on something that squeaked under foot.
“Oh, sorry! Not sure what that was,” he said automatically.
Vlad didn’t look away from his computer screen, “Oh, don’t worry It was probably a dog toy or stress toy from one of those conferences you like sending us to. I always forget to throw them away before bringing them into the office, ya know?”
Alfred knew too well about the swag bags that proliferated technical conferences. The bags, filled with corporate branded garbage, were often worth less than the energy required to make them. He looked around Vlad’s office. He took comfort seeing now how all the things he’d labeled as garbage had found a home in the chaos. Vlad pushed away from his desk, rolling over the numerous papers and other debris that littered his floor.
“I’m ready to head down to The Core if you are. Though, I could show you on my terminal here,” he paused to look around his office. He noticed the only other chair in the room was covered in an amalgam of the previous years’ work. He smiled shyly, “I think you’ll be more comfortable down there.”
Alfred was careful to maintain his neutral expression, preventing the desire to leave Vlad’s office with haste from showing.
“I agree, we’d have more space with the large screens down there,” he said as he moved to the door again, carefully placing his feet to avoid the squeaky object he’d found moments ago.
The pair walked in silence as they made their way downstairs to the atrium. Alfred noticed how their colleagues' eyes followed them across the atrium floor. He saw several onlookers from their office windows on the floor above. Samantha was waving at them from her office. Rajiv was in the atrium, at a terminal not far from The Core. Alfred wondered if Rajiv had selected that terminal intentionally so he might overhear the conversation that would soon take place.
Vlad took little time in pulling up his research notes on The Core’s terminal. “I put together a few slides to show you with background information,” Vlad said as he opened the presentation.
Alfred scanned over the slide in front of him. The title read, “Fatima’s Ghost.” Alfred was immediately glad that he had spoken to Rajiv. He turned to look over his shoulder, Rajiv had left his place in the atrium. Good, Alfred thought, no need for Rajiv to deal with Vlad’s insensitivity right now.
“Let’s move through the background quickly. I think I may have already caught up since the stand-up,” Alfred said. Vlad moved forward through the presentation slides, only four of them. They were about as chaotic as Vlad’s office. The information wasn’t presented in a linear fashion. Instead, Vlad preferred to use a circular logic that didn’t resolve in the mind until well after the presentation completed.
After the presentation, they moved into The Core’s data nodes. Vlad began moving too quickly through the multiple screens for Alfred to follow. He waited patiently until Vlad said, “Here! Look!”
On the screen, Alfred saw the code that had been most recently committed by Fatima. Fourteen years ago, unknown to him, she had placed logic in the simulation to prevent it from self-realizing. Her code was hacky, far from her best work, he thought. He followed the logic, understanding the mechanisms she had deployed were subtle enough to evade detection and clever enough to make the team look in the opposite direction. He shook his head in shock. Why had she done this? Why would she sabotage all the work they had accomplished together?
He thought of the years of research saved by their earlier use of the simulator to determine effective mechanisms to combat climate change, political turmoil, and fallout from the disastrous depression in the mid ‘20s. He thought of the human impact of her code, how many people had died because they couldn’t get actionable information. Or, perhaps, he shivered at the thought, they got corrupted information because of this code.
Alfred understood why Vlad had labeled his presentation “Fatima’s Ghost.” He couldn’t, however, grapple with why Fatima would do this. He allowed the questions in his mind to be formulated in a priority queue. Why Fatima did this might have been important to him, but it didn’t matter right now. He spilled the questions as fast as they could form to Vlad.
“What layers of The Core did this code manipulate? Do we have access logs for the file? How about runtime logs? When did this code execute? How often? Did it run every time we ran the simulator? Is this code the source of the simulator’s failures lately?”
Vlad typed quickly on the keyboard. He finished typing out Alfred’s questions only a few seconds after Alfred finished speaking. He turned to Alfred.
“Uh, well. We… I…” he sputtered, unsure of where to begin.
Alfred broke in, “Hang on.” Alfred pressed his fingers to his temples, trying to focus on the feeling he was experiencing once again. There was another important question just beneath the substrate of conscious thought. He shook his head as the feeling dissipated, it was gone. In its place, he formulated another question that would hopefully lead Vlad to a decent starting point.
“Show me what you have Nat and Renee working on. I might not be able to follow all the math now, but that will at least give me a foothold.”
Vlad smiled widely, finally he’d get to show off the beauty of his discovery. He moved through several windows to pull up the code he’d written. His code had been working silently in the background to correlate the massive data sets and electrical pulses that modified the parameters throughout the simulator’s execution.
Vlad spoke to answer some of Alfred’s questions as he navigated the terminal. “One of the most interesting things about Fatima’s code is that I don’t think it ever got run. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t have an impact in the simulation. You see, Fatima’s code was only ever to run if the processes within the simulation ever became aware of the incongruities that we programmed in as monitoring devices. The simulation would have to become self-aware in a way that’s impossible based on our management layer. Fatima clearly wasn’t convinced by that layer though.”
When Vlad finished speaking, Alfred discovered he was left with even more questions. “How was her code meant to work? You said it never ran but may have had an impact? Are you suggesting that it could still be the cause of our recent failures?”
Vlad stepped back from the terminal, allowing Alfred to have a closer look at the symbolic logic that conveyed the internal states of the simulator. Vlad responded to Alfred’s questions as he moved out of the way.
“If it had run, which, again, the logs don’t show it ever did, it would have modified the electron’s charge in the process or processes that were becoming aware. That would have effectively reset the process's ability to recall the events that resulted in awareness. It’s a decently clever way to allow the simulator to continue running on the parameters we set while preventing it from spiraling out of our control.”
Alfred listened to Vlad’s words closely. He was beginning to understand Rajiv’s concern that Vlad had discovered something about Fatima’s departure from their lab. He was struck with a sudden sadness that Fatima hadn’t felt comfortable sharing this with him. He tried to remember those days, shortly before Fatima had left, but couldn’t recall the work, just the personal pain of the miscarriage.
“Okay,” Alfred said, grasping the edges of the keyboard, re-centering himself. “So, if it never ran, and we have verified,” Alfred physically leaned into the word, “evidence of that, how could her code modify the simulation?”
Vlad blushed for a moment, “I haven’t asked the forensics team to verify it, but unless someone with that level of access deleted the logs…”
Vlad left the rest unsaid. Joane was the only person, to Alfred’s knowledge, who had that kind of access. He couldn’t recall her ever traveling out to this site.
“Right,” Alfred agreed, “That’s highly unlikely.”
Vlad nodded behind Alfred, “The way it could have modified the simulator, however, is via the management system’s awareness of the code. The Management AI we use to corral the simulation’s data into a usable form may be operating with the intention to avoid allowing the occupants to achieve the requisite level of awareness they need to proceed with the goal we’ve set.” Vlad paused.
He took in a large breath before continuing, “What I’ve got Nat and Renee working on, what you’re looking at…” Vlad halted, seemingly unsure of his words, “It’s my theory. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me. I checked my math, if the premise is sound, I think the math is too.”
Alfred understood that Vlad was intentionally talking around the part he was most excited about. He turned to look at Vlad, “I’m sure they will prove the logic in your work, what’s your theory?”
Vlad coughed gently to clear his throat, “The simulation is hindering itself and then self-destructing in frustration.” He laughed to himself nervously. He spoke quickly before Alfred could respond, “You probably think the idea is crazy; I’m sure Nat and Renee did.”
“Quite the opposite, actually,” Alfred said before turning back to the terminal. “I’d like you to explain each step of your theory to me as we step through the math. I don’t want to delete Fatima’s code until we know with more certainty the effects of our actions. I’m not sure I understand how our management layer would express frustration, but I assume you’ve thought up a manner to show that mathematically.”
Vlad sighed in relief. “Really?! You think I could be onto something here?” he said excitedly.
“At this point, we’ve had too many unexplained failures for me to dismiss anything an engineer brings forward. Now, explain this to me.”
They spent the next three hours going over the data sets and mathematical proofs Vlad had developed in support of his argument. At each turn, Alfred challenged Vlad’s premises by offering alternative explanations for the discrepant, malformed data. At the end of their discussion, Alfred’s mind was spinning with the math and data they’d been going over. He felt a deep pit of exhaustion opening within him. It was only midday, he thought to himself. He and Vlad had decided to take a break for lunch and a bit of respite. Vlad himself looked like he would fall asleep standing if they continued to plow through.
Alfred continued to let his thoughts spiral as he mounted the stairs to his office. As he breached the hallway near his office, he acknowledged his own grasp of Vlad’s theory for the simulator’s failures. He felt the thoughts click into place like a perfected display of domino art. He smiled at the resolution, allowing it to fade into the back of his thoughts. He was satisfied with his sudden understanding.
As he approached his office, he looked up from the clean tile floor. A blank slate, an empty array, he thought. He was rather surprised to find Rajiv outside his office. Rajiv was holding a notepad to his chest with a slackened expression.
“Did we have a meeting scheduled?”
“I’m not sure,” Rajiv said tentatively, “There’s a meeting on my calendar, but maybe it was just a placeholder?”
Alfred admonished himself privately, he knew he’d forgotten to remove something from his calendar earlier. The sudden exhaustion he felt soured his mood further. He had the urge to go home early. He needed to rest, he thought.
He waved to Rajiv, “I’m not sure. Do you mind if we postpone and meet tomorrow if necessary?”
“I don’t think there’s anything urgent right now,” Rajiv moved away from Alfred’s office.
Frowning at the depth of his fatigue, Alfred walked into his office. He paused, looking around as if there was a mystery waiting for him. He sighed, collected his things, and left for the day.
He waved to Vlad and Samantha on his way out of the office. They were arguing about something important, it seemed. They waved back before returning to their conversation. Alfred mumbled to himself, “I wonder how the simulator will fail tonight.”
Good day
The next day, when Alfred arrived at the lab, he was struck by the sudden realization that he’d forgotten something. He patted his khaki pockets, registering their contents. “Keys, wallet, pen, pad, and phone,” he said as he felt the objects. He tried to shrug off the feeling as he began walking toward the lab, “Well if it was important, I’m sure I’ll remember it shortly!”
Welcome to the end. Or is it the beginning? Maybe somewhere in the middle? Maybe the simulation will never let us know.
Thanks for reading While(True):! I really enjoyed writing this story about simulation theory applied to an infinite loop. I hope you enjoyed reading it.