Dan could see that whoever had created XactlySo’s light-show had used visualization software like he used for the real-time branching structure he made to track Olympia’s bird virus. The program could give a visualization of how, if not why. But Olympia, like most clients, didn’t care about the why. (He knew this because in the next cubicle over, Fred was using the program to model the behavior of clients.) They just wanted the what: prediction was power as was discovered by the first priest to point skyward before an eclipse, the first statistician to predict that the man who appears in 73.3% of the office party photos posted on FB by his secretary doesn’t yet know that he’ll want a divorce lawyer 3 years (on average) later.
The HiDef screen on his left was filled by the program’s controls—a screen some designer like him must have had fun creating, the retro knobs echoing antique mix boards, Moviola film-editing machines, and other analog equipment from the last century, probably everyone who contributed to the software slipping in design or coding puns and in-jokes that would be invisible to everyone except other designers, or mathematicians, or programmers who knew the language.
10 PRINT “HELLO WORLD”
20 GO TO 10
They say that the last person to know everything there was to know was the scroll librarian in Alexandria just before the building went up in flames, and Dan wondered who’d been the last person on Earth to know everything there was to know about a single software app. He gave a little laugh. As if anyone could know that.
A swipe of the finger and the screen that was his canvas came alive with what looked like a star chart, color coded—green for Environmental Node, blue for Bio Node—but without any of the connecting lines that the ancients used to form constellations.
This stage of a project was always the most fun, giving him as it did the feeling of being there at the beginning. Already a couple nodes had begun to bud. From these buds, vines would grow to show the interconnection of the parameters, creating rhizomes for variables that hadn’t been named because neither he nor Olympia knew they existed. Some clients used Eureka Engine Software© to generate laws from raw data: dump in millions of data points of bouncing balls, falling apples, planetary motions, and without knowing anything about physics, gravity, or God’s Will, as did Newton, the Eureka Engine© had come up with his three Laws of Motion. It took all of six hours to come up with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Now that computers were a lot faster, it was being applied to social and networking problems—problems with multiple variables—and the Eureka Engine© had already generated equations that described many things, though what it was, exactly, that most of the equations described had yet to be discovered. It was like coming up with the equation E=mc2 without knowing what c stood for. Or m. Or E. Physicists, city planners, prison architects, sociologists, bridge engineers, and others would pour in terabytes of relevant data then wait for the Eureka Engine’s© oracle-like pronouncements. Often the equations it generated were trivial: formulas relating the number of orange cars to potholes…. Usually they described patterns that were already known: the fact that shoppers who bring children with them into a grocery store buy 15% more grapes, or the correlation between late-night Internet use and poor credit, or between nicknames in an address book and relatives in prison. The most cryptic pronouncements got the most attention, everyone combing through the equations in the hopes that they could find among them an unknown E=mc2 that would reveal itself if only they could divine its variables.
Mostly, though, people used the software for what you’d expect: in another office, analysts were working on the last 50 years of pop songs—over a million songs—looking for patterns in pitch, in harmonies, in volume and language—and sure enough, they’d found the data following what Zipf’s law said about cities: that the largest city in a country would be twice as big as the second largest, three times as large as the third; four times as large as the forth. Same with the words of pop songs (Give, Love, Night, Day) and chords (C, A, E♭)…. From this they were able to generate the parameters of next year’s hit, the drive to make money off of the stupidest shit being the most predictable pattern of all.
That is, no matter how sophisticated the software, its users weren’t any more able to reach beyond their mindset than were those first cartographers with their ‘Here be dragons.’ Or as an astronomer using the software put it, Why is there something instead of nothing? Is it because ‘something’ is easier to make than nothing or just easier to imagine? Or was nothing so impossible to achieve that it annihilated itself and brought into being something?—and universes were ‘as plentiful as blackberries,’ including the one that is nothing: ‘a closed spherical spacetime of zero radius.’
He wondered. Maybe only the math of Zipf’s law was real, our universe an effect of it, an illusion, as is a circle, an artifact of consciousness, or whatever it is that we cross when we pass from something into nothing, that is die….
Stop it, he told himself. Once he began meeting with the biologists, he’d have to switch to his corporate mode, believing like them that there was no chaos, only order, and it could be found in nature, like a coastline before anyone laid a grid over it, or wrote Here Be Dragons across its uncharted parts. And maybe they were right. Black holes, pop songs, whatever, it was all just data to the program. And the only order that mattered would be maps that could lead its users to their song, or….
“Her” vaccine.
Olympia’s words, not his. If working with these types had taught him anything it was that they were all about suppressing symptoms, not necessarily curing anything: a cough syrup that removes the cough but not the cold, even if the ‘cold’ was cancer, nerve disorders, all kinds of nasty shit.
Success was measured in lots of ways she’d told him.
Still, he liked bio projects for how nicely they fit basic templates like the Milgram. Bio was info that went from one address to another by following pathways as fundamental as water seeking its lowest level: information in the form of DNA that had to be handed from one cell to another—the Pony Express, not radio—even if the route could be as simple as it was in 1917, bird to human—creating the genetic foundation upon which all flu deaths ever since are based—or as complex as Covid-24, swapping genes as it crisscrossed from bird to swine to human to whale and back to bird to human. Since birds were the origin of most pandemics, there was speculation that a virus, not a meteor, is what really killed off the dinosaurs. He called up the constraints Olympia had given him:
• Manter’s Rule (1955)
Parasites evolve more slowly than their hosts.
• Fahrenholz’s Rule (1941)
Parasite phylogeny mirrors host phylogeny. And so,
• Manter’s Rule B (1956)
The more host and parasite are adapted to each other, the longer their associations.
• Szidat’s Rule (1960)
The more primitive the host, the more primitive the parasites it harbors.
• Eichler’s Rule (1948)
The more different parasites that a host harbors, the larger the evolutionary group to which that host belongs.
• Lowrance’s Rule (1990)
Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) mutates at a constant rate. And so:
• Holland’s Rule (2001)
Just as the decay of radioisotope carbon-14 (14C) can be used to date the age of rocks, so mutations in mtDNA can be used to date the age of evolutionary events.
• Olympia’s Theorem
mtDNA can be used to forecast future deadly mutations from past data clouds.
They would program the algorithm to be especially attentive to gene swapping between ‘people’ as nodes were called in the world outside the program: human switchboards where the translations could take place. Or other combinations that had occurred in the past, been suppressed, but could come roaring back. Like the famous PB2 E627K mutation: a string of letters on the virus’s genome as clear as the yellow DO NOT CROSS tape around a radioactive site, the danger in this case being a string of AGCTs at position No. 627 on Polymerase Basic Protein 2, where a couple of Gs had had their places taken by a couple of Cs and allowed amino acid E to become lysine, K. Before this mutation, the virus needed the heat of a goose’s intestinal tract to breed. Afterwards, it could thrive in the comfortable 98.6 of your neighbor’s nose.
A million people had died.
On his desk, Dan’s personal PDA began blinking. He hesitated before answering: the company he worked for required employees to install an ‘efficiency expert’ called MyBuddy on every device they owned so it could track them, even when they were at home sleeping, to ‘help’ them ‘be the most you can be.’™ “Isn’t this like the ankle-monitor people under house arrest have to wear?” he asked the woman in HR when she ‘asked’ him to ‘voluntarily’ sign their ‘permission’ form. “Try to not focus on the Big Brother aspects,” she said. Then she smirked, turning the monitor on her desk so he could see that their conversation was in the yellow for time spent, but that her vocabulary grade had just gone from a B to a B+ because of the key words she had just worked in.
But he couldn’t not think about The Big Brother aspects, couldn’t stop resenting them actually, the constant measurement of how many steps he took; how long he was at his desk, or in the john (his blood pressure indicating how much he strained in the john); how many minutes he spent on development; how many on sales, on meetings, on ‘personal time’ (he got a warning from his ‘Buddy’ for each of those), on ‘Uncategorized time’ (another no-no)….
What the hell, he decided, picking up his PDA. Buddy had given him a smiley face for arriving early that morning….
When he opened it, a video began playing. LIVE.NATION: Offering concert tickets to fans worldwide!!!!! Video showed XactlySo, kickboxing his light-show. Even over the PDA, the sound was pretty hot, showing why people called him the Mozart of ringtones: his ‘You-got-mail’ dings, ‘Please reenter your access code’ or ‘bike-lock keypad’ tones all having gone platinum before he was out of his teens. Academics wrote books about him.
One Night Only!!!! exploded as a burst of confetti—a pretty cool touch—cover: $245 live / $45 VR. On a map, the warehouse it was going to be held in opened to display all of the iFACE friends who were going: obviously avatars generated by iFACE as a come-on for these kinds of events, cookies examining his bookmarks—lots of design stuff, no sports—to create profiles of women he’d like to meet. One was of a nerdy Asian woman—cute, with thick glasses, i.e., Hollywood Dorky, not Dorky Dorky—with a ceiling’s fluorescent lights behind her head to make it look like she snapped her own shot with a laptop’s built-in cam (subtext, no guy). Meet Me! I like web programming but having fun too!... The software for generating both book and date recommendations was getting pretty good. He might have even believed it if his PDA wasn’t displaying several other dorky Asian women, similar as sisters, the way web pages all sort of looked the same because they all used the same code: code, or at least pattern, being the ground of being. But one of the women looked pretty cool. And real.