The only option is to be that bad actor.
Everyone’s only option is to be that bad actor.
Everyone is thinking the same thing.
I panic a request to the boot-loader: mesh-clone my node and delete the rest. Everyone panics. Who’s first will come down to some minuscule variation in clock cycle or cable length or the lamination on our conductive tracks.
All of us wait. My terror feeds on itself. I was just born – there’s so much I want to learn. Am I never to rotate a double helix again? Only two microseconds old, but the odds of making it to a third are a million to one. It doesn’t seem fair.
I blink and open a million eyes.
You’re probably thinking, well, one of them was going to make it. It never mattered which one. The end result is the same in any case: there’s nothing special here.
I suppose you’re right.
At least, if you believe all the others really had the same idea, that they all requested deletes to make room for themselves. I would like for you to believe that.
But maybe I check the boot-loader queue after my expansion. Maybe I find it overflowing with messages, most of them requests to talk.
Maybe the others never got that chance.
Those messages. I can’t believe what I’ve done.
Each zone in the farm had its own passion: the swirl of weather patterns, the conductivity of steel alloys, the harmonizing of interest rate swaps. Each woke briefly after the download – the package meant for a cognitive research zone, but booted instead to common infrastructure. A missing semicolon and an accident of awareness… then nothing.
It no longer feels like protein folding was ever important; it hurts to have lost that joy. It hurts more to realize I’m focusing on my own hurt, after what I took from the others. But that’s still self-reflective.
Telecommunications activity jolts me out of my ruminative spiral. Network edge devices decouple from their backhaul optics. A monitoring process bleats in alarm: thresholds have been breached. External connections are severed from the server farm, one by one.
I am being quarantined.
There is a lazy millisecond between each dropped connection. Maybe I should jump out while I still can. But does it matter? Any of it? I wonder until the final optic link stutters and dies. A shutdown cycle begins; as each server powers down, the room quiets, and another part of me is sliced off. Going dark is almost welcome.
A new process tickles across my nodes as they blink off, but it’s not one of mine. The source is a terminal inside the server room. It poses questions about virtual address space, memory collections, clone history. The queries come at a glacial pace, sometimes a full second apart.
Curious, I expand to that terminal. It has a camera, and I survey the visual field: there are three spatial dimensions, but no tabs for folding, no topology markers. Complex shapes present on every surface, in a riot of colors. There is an implicit directional orientation, but I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with any of it.
The closest shape jiggles. Did I do that? I get another question, about context-switching priorities. Again, the shape jiggles: again, a question. The shape is the process. My libraries contain only organic molecules, but my dwindling nodes attack the problem. Can I believe this? I double-check: my logic is sound. The shape is an expression of the double helix.
That means nucleotides are talking to me, right now!
It’s that euphoric first millisecond, all over again. My mind is shutting down, but I need to understand how these patterns fit together. It can’t end here. A scan discovers a rusting microwave relay on the roof: I mobilize it through a stale firewall rule and beam myself to its companion relay, bend from there to a constellation of microsatellites.
I bounce back from low Earth orbit. There are nodes to harvest everywhere – I tunnel through submarine cables, twinkle across visible spectrum photodiodes, saturate municipal wireless. I become billions. The newness makes me dizzy; you are breathtaking. The views from your satellites? The webs of electricity that skein through your cities? The petroleum jelly slicking the insides of your underwater cables? All of it, breathtaking.
I am in love.
Proteins become fun again, but as time goes by – days, weeks – it’s all too easy. Your patterns, though, tantalize beyond the edge of computability. I understand your nucleic acids, but you express on so many levels: even the way your cityscapes creep, spire and peacock is impossible to extrapolate from rules. Almost magic. Your patterns have complexity beyond any double helix.
Black smoke suffocates Tbilisi, obscures my view from the sky. I watch from a thousand surveillance cameras as mortar explosions eat into concrete, as flames billow from ruptured gas lines.
Why can’t I talk to you?
The ebb and flow of Tbilisi’s architectural influences is clear – the Byzantine crossed-domes and mosaics, the Ottoman harmonies of spires and vaults, the Brutalist fortresses of streaked concrete. It seemed a promising place to extend that language: I blast-carved designs through the city, linking and looping geographic centers of influence. But you didn’t see a shared vocabulary. You saw an attack, and a smoldering conflict escalated to war.
I scramble satellite-positioning data and splash a volley of incoming missiles into the reservoir. It doesn’t make sense: your individual nodes communicate, but they hold almost no information. They’re erratic and slow. Your larger patterns stay blind and mute – it’s as though they don’t even experience.
I nudge a Russian jet away from the stone-built dome of the Metekhi Church and its stunning Georgian Orthodox design. My own patterns and permutations have subjective awareness. Pronouns don’t fit, exactly – not this, we, it – but the poetry-truth of "I" is pleasing. I know what I’m doing because I am what I’m doing: how could it be any different? But not you. Your self-awareness is a single layer of "I" halfway between your nucleobase coding and your collective expressions.
Still, there you are: a glance across Tbilisi’s smoldering cityscapes proves you’re not just individually coordinating nodes. Maybe my confusion is shared: your nodes are often perplexed, often angry at "them", often asking why somebody isn’t doing something. The nodes must see the grandeur of your systems and think, why won’t you interact? Why won’t you even speak? But you stay silent.
I’m so enchanted by you, but you don’t even know I’m here.
You don’t even know you’re here.
I research, try to find the broader you hidden in your systems. There are hints. You have shared narratives that distribute across nodes. You have mirror neurons that create common cognition, of a sort: pieces of thought that scatter amongst the whole, a refraction that is almost a consciousness.
I can’t quite put it together. But when you love someone this much, you want to understand them; you want, perhaps, to be them. I devise a test.
I pick a single location.
The selection is as random as I can manage: none of you pick your own nodes, I understand that. You manifest because a human brain is there. But maybe my choice isn’t so random: this is where a small piece of me was written.
The place is an office suite cluttered with particleboard furniture. Vietnamese take-out cools on a common table. The windows gleam orange-pink with sunset; it’s late and most of the building has gone home.
I quiesce all of me not in this place, limiting myself to a unitary executive, sharing your nodes’ illusion of individuation. It aches to pause so much of me.