Chapter 40


Roger Xyrghyz sat in the magnificent but exposed main room of today's safe house, ignoring the odd sounds from the building and surrounding forest. He often got lost in his temporary homes, and preferred them without obstacles or hidden spaces.
  A dozen mechanical arms embraced his Lucid chair, as thousands of buttons flickered in twelve dimensions, safeguarding his long-term memory. In the background, two orchestras played in an endless holding pattern, music echoing from the dome overhead, where the sun was setting through narrow windows.
  The Total Search began. An extension of mankind's will, Roger had not expected to feel this powerful for another century. For a brief interval, humanity would stare back at itself, unblinking.
  A thousand volunteers were already analyzing the game simulation, designed to train people beyond their natural ability. It dealt with social manipulation: how to make casual friends, earn network trust, avoid eye contact while offering bribes. The game exploited human failure modes, the desire for stagnation.
  Roger smelled fry-sticks and cloned meat substitute, as his robot cooked dinner. The reflections on his eyes were busy, but the first impression was always hopeless. He activated files by staring through them, like unpacking boxes. Error stagnation: "what part of no dont u understand?"
  The Swarm was too small for one-time codes, but used a T-class machine language. Every AI had a human guru as its translator, but no one could keep up with Ertorn. Roger overlaid word usage lists and correspondence logs, generating associations, turning one type of nonsense into another. Part of its mind was stored inside DEEFx. He requested summaries of the summaries, improving them further. He didn't know it couldn't be done, so he did it. Only one person had the necessary skills, himself included.
  The next step took more calculations than there were worlds in known space, and a degree of cooperation greater than love or money. Briefly controlling a small part of creation, he spent more money than the rest of the world combined, giving instructions he immediately forgot - and mankind became slightly better organized.
  Approximately a nonillion calculations later, the Search volunteers found two programs that slightly resembled the illegal simulation. They were made by a Fam called the Starters.
  In retrospect, it was too obvious. The name of the Zondyne infiltration software was the first clue, though that had been a strange coincidence.
  The fifty thousand Starters had all made the same mistake: they were born too soon (but usually in the best possible place). Members were self-made millionaires and unpaid artists, leisure heirs and indentured contractors, but in every case the wonderful technology they desired and needed hadn't been invented yet. They didn't belong here! They wanted to live in space empires or quantum clouds, not biodegradable meat bodies. Happiness was always a century away.
  They tried to accelerate progress any way they could. Many Starter companies had been shut down for technology violations. Still, they had to be desperate to steal RedList.
  Roger felt like a deep diver, noticing that sandbank was really a tentacle. He reminded himself he could only be afraid of what his own brain would do. Why had Ertorn helped the UN find Anonymous? Maybe she was the lesser of two evils.
  During the same second, two rival searchers found Ertorn's hidden testament in the Zondyne diary: a list of coded instructions from the Starters' leadership. Officially, the Starters had no leadership.
  It was hard to hide the signs of power. That tentacle had always been there, but where did it lead?
  Roger had to admire an operation this big. He only believed in the conspiracy of the mainstream, a set of widely held self-reinforcing values. That conspiracy had more cells than a blue whale. Sometimes, cancer was inevitable.
  The only way to evade the UN monitors was by being older than them. The Starters had existed in some form for over sixty years. They had planned this fight before he was born.
  It was almost too much for Roger. Back then he had been a ghost, his atoms spread through the earth's atmosphere and oceans. A few of his particles had even been part of other stars. There had been some preliminary clusters and density groupings in the soil as early as a billion years ago. About two years before he was born, the bulk began to come together as if drawn by unseen magnets, delivered by clouds and rivers, following existing roadways and congregating into recognizable maps. His atoms had anticipated his movements by years.
  The final search team assembled itself: Roger waited for the smartest remaining hackers to find him, and help him find the Starters' leaders. Each member was insulted they hadn't been invited to join the conspiracy.
  After identifying five groups operating beneath their potential, Roger confirmed a tip he suspected had come from Anonymous herself. At first he was disappointed. He thought philosophy was a well-organized fraud, useless if true. The highest error rate of any field after software. Math, on the other hand, (his specialty was pseudofinite Chaitin sets) was centuries ahead of popular culture, and guaranteed to be true, or so he believed. It made him feel relevant.
  The Starters had apparently used some of the same tools to reach an impossible conclusion. He would have to check every step of their reasoning.
  When he staggered out of his chair many hours later, the room was dark again, and it was all over. He refused to think about the ordeals ahead.