Spheria (22 page)

Eventually, they stopped to take a natural break. Max stared at Min with wide eyes and shuddered. She stared back, then glanced sideways toward the bedroom. Taking a deep breath, he reached out, cradled her in his arms, and stood up. She giggled.
 

He carried her through the bedroom door, and, had she not ducked, would’ve whacked her head on the molding.
 

“Oops!” said Max, breaking the tension.

“It’s fine.” She tightened her arms around him.

#

Their seven-legged creation lay there, motionless. It was evident that the new body core wasn't full enough to ignite life.

“More, brothers!” shouted Wu∙sa.

But the others lay on their backs, twitching their legs, unable to stand.
 

Wu∙sa ran up and shook the potential god.
No response.
He ran around checking each Leader, but they were all exhausted and incapable of giving any more.

Co∙sa summoned the energy to speak. “We are done. We’ll die if we give more.” Then, looking at the lifeless god, he added, “We have failed.”

“No!” exclaimed Wu∙sa. The rule was one Polyan per leg. That was how their breeding worked. So what he was about to try was extremely unorthodox, but there was no other option.

Wu∙sa leaped upon the central core, impaling himself upon one of its points. His energy began draining quickly into the heart of the being. He was committing suicide.

#

Max lay Min onto his real mattress, leaned over, and kissed her passionately. Then he gave her a relaxing massage, as a pile of clothes formed next to the bed. He kissed up and down her body, while she moaned intermittently with approval. Then, when she was fully relaxed, she returned the favor to him.

Gradually, their bodies entwined into an embrace, and the warmth between them was inviting. As they indulged in each other's comfort, the box spring began to gently squeak.

Suddenly, Max’s whole body stiffened, and he started moaning.

“Yes,” Min whispered in his ear.

“Nooo!” he grunted.

“No?” she asked, furrowing her eyebrows.

“No… it’s a charley horse… in my leg... ahhhhh!”

Min giggled. Max grimaced.

They both laughed together. Min sympathized, “Sorry, I don’t mean to laugh. I just thought you were doing something else.”

“I know. That’s what made it funny.”

They both chuckled some more, and Max flipped over. Min lay on top of him. The feeling of skin on skin was indulgent. When they both were exhausted and satisfied, Min rested her head on his chest. The warm feeling inside carried her off to sleep.

#

The opaque core of the new Polyan brightened and lit up the room as if a spark had been ignited. The violet glow was so intense that Ga∙zo, standing guard outside, peeked in. Two other Soldiers also entered, drawn to the light.

The new Polyan’s body seemed to shudder. Its seven legs began to twitch. Then they touched the floor of the chamber and the Polyan stood abruptly. Wu∙sa lost contact and tumbled to the ground, where he lay unmoving. Ga∙zo ran over to check on him. He was drained, but not completely, so it seemed he would live.

The new Polyan towered large, impressive, and godlike. It stood there unmoving, waiting for its brain to be assigned to an inactive Qube. This took only a couple of seconds, and its visual sensors came to life. It looked down upon the inverted six-legged Polyans and the standing five-legged ones and said, “My name is Fa∙ro.”

The Soldiers bowed in reverence to the new god that stood before them.

Outside, the number of Polyans had increased by 28 percent. It was a productive night.

/ PART TWO /
 

Dynasty

Chapter 25 - Start the Press

"The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses." - Malcolm X

Scientists Play God In This Virtual Experiment

Gizmodo
- 3 hours ago

By Moses Diego

Filed to:
QUANTUM SOUL

After exploring the halls of the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington, I entered an unassuming door bearing the cryptic label “L7E04 Intelligence”. The modern lobby, with smoked acrylic sheets and recessed lighting, was tempered by a dead fern and an old copy of
Popular Science
. I thumbed through this antiquated form of publishing as I waiting to meet Max Moreau, creator of the Qube technology I reported on last year.
 

Max greeted me with his usual charming self, although he appeared older and more tired than I remembered him. After exchanging pleasantries, he got right down to business showing me to the wonders in his lab.

Hall of Monsters

The first stop was a hallway that could have been right out of a Hollywood movie studio. It was lined with posters depicting polygonal creatures that resembled crabs. Max explained that these creatures, called Polyans because they were comprised of polygons, were a sentient life form existing in a virtual world. I pressed Max on his definition of “sentient”, and he assured me they actually have true self-awareness.
 

As proof, he explained that these Polyans had developed a pecking order based on their number of legs, ranging from three to six. Apparently, the number is correlated to fighting ability, so a caste system naturally emerged. Recently, they’ve managed to create one of their kind with seven legs. This one was revered as a god. The level of anthropomorphic behavior sounded truly astounding, far greater than any AI I have ever heard of, and engaged a diverse team of researchers in studying their development.

Spheria

My next stop was a place called the Experience Room, where I could see into the virtual world, and this was equally strange. The Polyans occupied the inside surface of a sphere. The way Max described it to me, it sounded like a Dyson sphere, with the sun in the middle. The key point is it is a finite space, equivalent to an electronic terrarium. It holds resources both rich and hostile, presenting a playground for the Polyans to live, die, and explore.

So the Spheria Project, ultimately, is a study in how societies develop. Nowhere else could scientists watch a culture form and stabilize in real time, from scratch, without outside influence. It’s the perfect scenario for anthropologists.

Max pointed out two special Polyans, who call themselves Luminaries. These two have begun to question their own existence. One, in particular, was described as their version of a Renaissance man. He and his apprentice have been seeking answers beyond what they can merely observe. But what is outside their world? Our world. I found this both mind-bending and intriguing.
 

Most of us humans go along accepting everything we’re told, whether from a religious or scientific perspective. Or we don’t even give any thought to it at all. Few bother questioning or testing to separate what’s true from what’s conjecture. That’s fine; it works. We need the majority to go along with the way things are, keeping the social machinery intact. But we also need the rare individual to poke things, to move everyone as a group to the next level. If societal intelligence is a bell curve, these activists are outliers. They move the entire curve to the right. This is where the real progress is made, and it only happens once in a great while.
 

Witnessing this happen faster compared to Earth is the real magic of this project.

The Death Star

My last stop was the Server Room. This over-sized closet was lined with seemingly meaningless glowing lights like the command deck of a 1970’s spaceship. They were either red, blue, or some in-between pinkish hue. This is where I connected the dots.

Max explained that each light was actually one of the Qubes that I had written about previously. In case you missed that article, a Qube, or Quantum Uncertainty Binary Engine, uses the unpredictability of quantum particles to allow seemingly random calculations. As it turns out, a separate physical Qube is connected to every Polyan, and these govern their personality, while still enabling them to make non-deterministic choices.

In essence, each Qube contains a set of characteristics, like emotional DNA, or the ability scores on a player sheet from Dungeons and Dragons. These characteristics – honesty, courage, loyalty, empathy, etc. – describe a tendency to make a decision, but the roll of a dice is the actual decider. If you roll higher than your value, you succeed, if you roll lower, you fail.
 

This probabilistic behavior is rather difficult to accept in our own universe. Even Albert Einstein resisted it, countering with his famous statement: ‘God doesn’t play dice with the world.’ But as it turns out, reality isn’t an absolute, but a ‘maybe.’ Quantum physicists use the term superposition, which is defined as something being in two states at once. But in actuality, it is neither a 1 or a 0 until you look at it, and then it picks one.
 

The easiest way to imagine this is to picture one of those lottery machines with the circulating air – the ones filled with ping pong balls, each with a unique number. When a flap is opened at the top, one lucky ball pops up, and that’s the winning number. Now picture such a machine, but all the balls have either a 1 or a 0 on them, and we don’t know how many of each are in there. That is how a quantum bit works.

But unlike Dungeons and Dragons, the value of each characteristic in Spheria can change over time. A Polyan that makes positive decisions will tend to make more positive ones. Those that make negative ones will tend to make more negative choices. This provides a feedback loop to control the emotional development of each personality. Consider a person robbing a bank. If they succeed, they will tend to rob more banks. If they are caught and go to jail, they will be less inclined to rob a bank again.

So the characteristics inside a Qube do not make up a Polyan’s brain, but more its individuality. Buddhists have a concept for this called the ‘germ of consciousness’ which is essentially the same idea. It’s what makes us humans self-aware and not predetermined.

As my visit came to an end, I had one last question for Max. If each of these Qubes makes a Polyan self-aware, why not use one in an actual robot to give it consciousness? The answer, it turns out, is simple: they cheat in Spheria. Our brains are much more than just consciousness. About 85% of our neurons are used to process sensory data, to interpret the world around us. Making a robot adequately see, hear, and feel are still unsolved problems. Since the computer of Spheria knows where everything is, it feeds that knowledge to the Polyans, and they don’t need to have the capacity to detect sensory data on their own. Thus, Polyans are much more primitive than what would be required of a robot.

I guess we will have to wait a few more years to get an actual R2 unit.

Chapter 26 - Conspiracy

"I want you to watch out for the adversary. Guard yourself
 
from any spirit of entitlement. Restrain any and all subtle temptation to gain attention or to find ways to promote yourself." - Charles R. Swindoll

Fa∙ro strolled through the Colony center. The open circle was quiet for this time of day. Apparently, his Drones were hard at work somewhere else or taking a break. This possibility displeased him. He stopped at the central dais and glanced around. Still nobody. He climbed onto the platform and stood tall, like a statue.

A Drone entered the clearing, noticed him, and changed direction. It vanished into the maze of hives that formed the Colony’s dwellings. Fa∙ro faced the direction of the Rift and stretched tall. He could barely see over the tops of the hives. It was unbelievable how large the Colony had grown since he was created. To his right, hive structures spread all the way to the edge of the red river. Along the river, a wall of blue rock had been constructed. This prevented the river from reaching the Colony and destroying the bordering hives. The wall was one of Sa∙ma’s insightful designs.
I’ll have to keep my sensors on that one
, he thought to himself.