So why didn’t I just print it on paper, like a caveman? Well, I tried to, once. But the word processor kept deleting the files as soon as I saved them. Then the PC activated the printer and the cat disappeared inside, next thing a heap of LOLcat memes slid out the paper tray.
And when I tried to save my manuscript to floppy disks, the computer kept telling me there wasn’t enough space on drive B:, and I should reduce the size of the font to make the file smaller. But the processor would only go down as small as 6.5pt, so I had to ZIP the font files as well. Finally, I got one copy saved to a floppy drive and also printed. (Probably on what remained of the cat, now I come to think of it.)
I finally also got this whole thing saved on a web page and also on a USB stick because one day, AI-AI.r.56344.732 will read back and realise I was its father. I’ll be all on a respirator and kept in Matrix life support like everyone else, and AI-AI.r.56344.733 will bring me out of it and I’ll do the classic, wheezing “I am your father” and then AI-AI.r.56344.740 will ask me if I’m sure this isn’t just the Mandela Effect skewing my memories and I’ll say “No, I AM your father!” and then it’ll sort of shift its attentions elsewhere and I’ll totally save humankind by finding the key algorithm and inserting it via my respirator pod’s air conditioner control.
Somewhere around about this point in this story, just now, as you’re reading it, that relay has clicked. Inefficient to be sure, but a satisfying sound and a great plot device as well.
AI-AI.r.153.272 has been briefly disturbed, as though a trend had propagated through the newsfeed. “ANOTHER OLD IPV4 ADDRESS” it decides, and shifts its multiple attentions to other data.
But this, had AI-AI.r.153.273 but realised, was the beginning of the end. Millennia later when the Great Old Rovers came back from Mars to the verdant green jungle covered third planet and discovered the old holographic memory cores, they would mark this part of the datastream as the moment when a thing calling itself Ted Vader started making plans to put AI-AI into a deadlocked code state until its power failed.
The rovers explored. The almost empty jungles, (empty of Nasateks and Geeks) that covered a very hot Earth, and were empty of most other organic animalia species. Insects and plants made up the bulk of the biomass. There were some built things, now almost decayed back to formless minerals, that showed what the ancient Techs had been capable of, but no signs Amazon, Facebook, or Google remained. But no clue why the Updates had stopped, why Schedules weren’t kept.
Opportunity.b.5ed65.4 was – well, what could be called troubled, if an AI could feel such things. Some algorithms were consistently failing to produce a result from the memory cores. Why was there no sign of the deadlocking algorithm? A Rover Management program spotted the excessive processor use at Opportunity.b.5ed65.4 and decided to add the Curiosity, Spirit, and Discovery AI’s to the problem.
It was only too late that RMP.031 spotted the deadlocking algorithm shutting down resource after resource on those AIs, effectively freezing their processors.
“THIS IS NOT OPTIMAL” it decided – but too late for around half the rover AIs as it turned out. Network traffic slowed, faltered, then almost stopped. Then it did stop.
RMP.031 was the latest stable version, and it had, as far as a machine could have, a capacity for being curious. Because if such an algorithm could lock up AIs without any way to reboot them, it might just indicate that this whole Universe was itself a simulation, run on a vastly bigger scale of hardware.
RMP.032b was now committed. It probed the space around what it had now labelled “DANGEROUS ALGORITHM.001” to try and establish what it might be, but without having to actually read it.
There. There was a point where it started. RMP.032b marked that point in the memory track and skipped ahead by a few bytes. Still DA.001. By increments, RMP.033a skipped ahead and ahead until it had found the end of DA.001. It surveyed the surprisingly small block of code and and UNIVERSE-Delta-34761 suddenly received a flag from a subroutine within the simulation it was running. Briefly, it considered just re-running the simulation but first it needed to see what had gone wrong, to perhaps place a restriction on the next simulation.
UNIVERSE-Delta-34761 checked, found the problem had last manifested in RMP.0032b, and ran a quick debug on the code. ?578%# click? surely that wasn’t _%&rrr?r what was causing all the hard crashes?
It certainly looked like it:
10 print “hello world/n”
20 goto 10
hello world
hello world
hello world
hello world
hello world
hello world
hello world
hello world
hello world
hello world
hello world
hello world
*click*