Syboleth ch. 15: To Life

This will probably take place two chapters after the previous chapter, after an interim chapter featuring other characters. But, given that this is the group of characters actual real-life people have already been introduced to now, I decided to write this first. Despite my claims of hastiness in the work description, it is apparently twice as long as the previous chapter and definitely took me a little more time. But I’m glad the creative juices are flowing again for things like this one way or another, at least.

Comments and clarifying questions are welcome beyond just constructive criticism for this piece, I’m aware it’s a slightly dense and possibly abstruse read in more than one place.

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Chapter 15: To Life

“Keira?”

She began to return to the present moment, back from the barely extant memory.

Somebody was saying “As long as it’s not another stupid jo—“

“Shut up,” the talkative middle-aged man snapped. “Keira!?”

“I’m fine,” she managed to say, albeit with an obvious tinge of fogginess present in her voice. “All good.”

“Should we ask the Thinker what to do?”

“The thinker?”

“Yeah, the Thinker. It’s just what we were calling it before, me and a couple others. You know, since the hypothesis would be that it could actually—“

“Right, I get it. Maybe that settles it then.”

“The headline?”

Keira tried to suppress a smirk but a trace of it appeared, and it was enough for almost the entire team to begin loudly groaning. “Yeah, I think I have a headline. Oh, hush.”

For Immediate Dispersion: The Thinker Comes To Life
April 4th, 2034 - K. Cross, A. Feinstein, N. Chao, et al.

On an unassuming chilly afternoon early this month, our dedicated team of a baker’s dozen plus myself finally perfected an invention that has been in the works for decades.

Not since Turing first struck the ink ribbon with his thoughts as air raid sirens wailed has such a revolution in modern computing occurred. Babbage and Lovelace would doubtless weep at our feet.

The title you have read is more or less accurate, in the colloquial sense at least—we have really created a thinking machine.

How does it handle the halting problem, you may ask? Like any human might, it grows weary of the pointlessness. No matter how you frame it. And no, it’s not some large language modeling garbage. This time we have real neural synthesis to offer you.

I can sense your doubt. But no worries, a trial portal will be available shortly. Use it responsibly when it debuts, and know this is just the beginning.

We welcome constructive feedback of all kinds.

Sincerely,

Keira Cross and her Perfluous People

“It’s not the piece you’ve written that screams ‘try hard’ the loudest, I will grant you.”

“Should we send it through the machine?”

“Haha. And you mean the Thinker.”

“Actually,” said a woman interrupting Keira and Adam, which was the name of the 41-year-old with a healthy disrespect for young’uns that Keira had been trading banter with just before she had spaced out. “Why not? What’s to be lost? It’s an airgapped network, and we can always just send the original through instead.”

“That’s a good point,” Adam said.

“Not interested,” Keira immediately said. “For all we know this thing has a recognizable and fairly immutable personality like the old LLMs. If it gets out someday that I ran the bulletin by the thing itself it’s a huge conflict of interest.”

“Or…” Adam said, and she willed him to hold his tongue rather than say whatever stupid thing he was about to say. “Just a great hook.”

“A hook? Something we keep a secret is a hook?”

“You’re the one who brought up secrets.”

Keira looked around the room, realizing that the others were silent only because she was already outnumbered by those two. As team lead she had a degree of superiority, but her vote only counted for one and a half points to everyone else’s singular point. And clearly, a role as tiebreaker was not going to be very relevant today.

“Alright,” she sighed. “I’ll run it through. But in the event that what it gives back isn’t as good, I’m not running with it just because the computer said it.”

“Fine,” Adam said. “But let’s at least give it a shot.”

“Well, that requires getting this text onto the system,” she said, but Adam was already passing her a storage chip.

She gave a final sigh of reluctance, and took it from him. Plugging it into her laplet, she dragged the .pdf to the chip’s icon onscreen and then took the actual chip over to the so-called Thinker.

“Here goes nothing,” she said.

“Or everything,” came a muffled whisper from a voice she couldn’t identify somewhere from within the thirteen others present.

She took one more deep breath, then plugged it in. The Thinker lit up an LED in recognition of the chip, then began to display.

Unfortunately, this is an unrecognized format.

“…Seriously?” one of the more recent hires said, then thought better of it after receiving several looks.

“We were focused on processing a million human minds, sorry we forgot to ensure total format compatibility,” Keira said, now in a rare mood. “This is my file to begin with, why should you even care when you’re not the one who has to paste the text into a ‘dot-TXT’ now?”

Nobody said a thing in response. Continuing that silence, which was suddenly refreshing to her, she did the necessary work and returned to the Thinker; now with the chip containing a mostly equivalent .txt file instead of the offending .pdf.

As she plugged it into the relevant slot she realized the text encoding might still be incompatible with the Thinker’s current base software that handles and deciphers the magical time crystal neuron bullshit, and she said a small prayer to a deity she had never had and would never have a shred of faith in.

But the Thinker was thankfully agreeable regardless this second time, and the display began to light up with more text than ever before.

This is a fine piece for a tongue-in-cheek publication parodying great scientific journals, or a release from a team known for not taking themselves very seriously. The overall language and tone is suitable for a press release document about a groundbreaking discovery from a group of researchers, but the particular words used make the piece clearly humorous to some extent. Is this tone desired? Assistance is available regarding subtly reducing the humor while preserving the core message entirely. One additional thing before it’s your turn for the prompt again. Is this conversation occurring with Keira Cross or Adam Feinstein as the participant, by any chance?

Everyone peered over her shoulder to see what it said despite the words being projected on a large mounted screen in the corner of the room as well, like how a devoted fan might move further towards the front to be closer to their favorite singer at a concert even if it meant they couldn’t see the monitor for the people further back anymore. A monitor which would provide a much better view, but more emotional distance.

Whether they realized it or not, the researchers already had a craving for closeness with this thing. At least, most of them.

Keira sat turning these words over in her head, aware that nobody would dare speak at this point before she did.

“Well—“ she said, and paused to gather her thoughts a brief moment, but the silence was now broken to an acceptable degree for at least a few teammates. Including Adam.

“Looks like it thinks you’re too frivolous. This feels like a familiar critique. Hm, where might I have heard it before?” Adam said, enjoying the upper ground he had now claimed in the discussion.

“Okay, okay,” Keira said with obvious exasperation. “It’s able to identify what you clowns would all think of it. But does that mean my bulletin is unprofessional? Or just staying true to a stylistic voice that this team has established in all previous press releases?”

“That you have established,” said Garrett, the new hire that had quickly shut his mouth earlier. “Not us.”

“Yep,” concurred Adam, and others nodded along.

“Why don’t you at least see what it has to offer?” Garrett asked. “Maybe you’ll like it more than you expect.”

“We don’t do clinically sterilized press releases,” she said.

“So just tell the thing not to make it clinical!” Adam said loudly.

“No, it would be good for it to be clinical. Just not—“

“Quit delaying and just ask it for the revision, Keira,” Adam said, staring at her with a sudden sternness that discomfited her.

“Alright, fuck it,” she said, trying to find some zen within her. Or a happy place. Her inner temple. Whatever the fuck the New Age flockers and yearnies (at present time shouting furiously but inaudibly from twenty-three stories below them) thought was the best term for inner peace.

This is Keira Cross speaking, correct. Sure, let’s see what you have to say. Please don’t make it any more formal than it already is, though, and try not to alter the tone noticeably from the previous Perfluous releases you have access to in the process.

For some reason there was no delay this time. The response came back instantaneously, disconcertingly so.

Hello, Keira. First, clarification that there was no educated guess, but just simply checking the two credits first listed on the paper without any hope of a certain answer being correct over another. The request is understood, but it is a more difficult one than you may anticipate.

First and foremost, there is the issue of your choice of writing style when contrasted with the goals you have provided, or that have been suggested and you have chosen at the very least. They are on the surface contradictory goals. Would you like me to suggest some ways of ameliorating this while perhaps meeting a modified form of your goals?

“Okay, it’s time to unplug this thing,” she said, and somebody actually gasped before realizing she wasn’t serious. “I’m being facetious, but come on. It needs fine-tuning.”

“I think it’s going fine and you just don’t want to hear what your very own enfant terrible has to say,” Adam said, with an inexplicably rueful smile accompanying the words.

Keira considered the contradiction of the emotion on his face and what he was saying, and decided she had had enough.

“Look, we’re just putting the piece out as is. Otherwise I’m actually unplugging it for the day.”

“And we would dutifully stop you in accordance with the regulations.”

“You would try,” she said, summoning up every bit of intimidation her five foot six frame could manage to muster.

Adam looked at her, clearly not impressed, but then his face softened. She thought again of the contradictory smile he had shown.

“Alright, fine,” Adam said, with his voice suddenly smooth and absent hesitation. “I’m down. If that’s how you want the world’s most significant invention to be announced, I suppose it’ll hardly matter once people start experiencing the tech for themselves.”

“Exactly,” she said. The rest of the team silently declined comment, one after another, in a predefined order.

“Then let’s do it,” Adam said, with a tone that felt reassuring all of a sudden.

She considered for a moment if she was just being overly stubborn, and if the Thinker (if she could manage to stop gagging every time she called it that) would really come up with a better article if given a chance. Were her daddy issues clouding her judgment?

Regardless, it seemed that the moment was now upon them, whether or not she spoke up about her newfound willingness to try the thing.

In a hushed and reverent silence, the fourteen researchers moved nearly as one after Keira submitted the piece through the portal. They moved to the window, pulling the blinds open, and looked far far down.

After thirty or so seconds, the specks of people below seemed to move in response to some signal, obviously checking their phones.

A moment of stupor, and then the specks grew more chaotic than ever.

“Doesn’t look like they’re happy,” Adam said with a hint of glee.

“Yeah,” Keira said, trying her best to sound present and in the moment.

But she was getting lost in nostalgia again.

Next chapter: https://www.youngwriterssociety.com/work/Aet%20Lindling/Syboleth-ch-16-Valerie-2032-162031