In Defense of Biohumans

In Defense of Biohumans

by Thomas Kraemer

© 2018 by the author

I’d known worse fears but not so many kinds at the same time.  I’d divided myself into so many subroutines I threatened to explode into chaotic computational noise.  I felt like a maniacal juggler riding out-of-control downhill on one foot on a polished rail. I lunged for more energy. Kicked in the energy load management subroutine, hoping I could complete this simulation in time to beat Flugent.  Just a few more gigapulse calcs and either a solution would emerge or Flugent would get the upper hand and knock our satellites out of the sky.  I was shedding power load to keep all the other parallel subroutines sync’d to keep me on track.  OK! I just got that butterfly effect jimmied in, and that’ll just barely thwart the thugs. For now.

In the far southern reaches of the Pacific, the sun splayed reflections off the towering convolutions of floating blue ice near the edge of what is left of the Ross Ice Shelf.  Amidst the vast spectacle, a sprinkling of dark shapes was moving purposefully, which upon closer inspection proved to be black and white Adelie penguins plodding toward the glistening waters.  A shaft of pulsing ruby red light briefly stabbed down from the sky in the blue and white field, lost in the sun’s glare, if anyone had been looking.  It made a sudden hiss and billow of steam above the ice.  Eight penguins in synchrony lifted their bowed swaying heads, stopped, and missing just one beat turned forty-five degrees and nonchalantly splashed into the water 12.3 meters away.  If they had not been disturbed by the red strobe and burst of steam, they would have continued another 83 to 90 meters before turning north, and then plunged into the ocean.  As it turned out, the change was just enough to cause a pod of orcas hunting nearby to flip their dorsal fins, change course and gobble up five of the eight penguins.  That in turn changed the surface turbulence just enough to push a convection cell in the air ten minutes later to rise one-half meter higher than it otherwise would have.  Then, the cumulative effects of that air disturbance over a progressively larger area during the next three days would cause air stability and precipitation events that would move the path of a tropical storm near the equator, enough to prevent its hitting an island where our research facility is located. 

The anticipation and counter-anticipation and counter-counter-effects of the battling algorithms created a befuddling blur, but that’s always been part of the fog of war.  My butterfly effect simulation was done just in time to prevent its effects being wiped out by Flugent’s inevitable counter-simulation.  The resulting computational blitz created towering spikes in power draw on our available energy source.  Even so, I beat the response-time window by 200 nano-seconds.  This whole effort of mine was a counter-simulation itself, in response to the earlier, and I must say less elegant, intervention by Flugent that created the tropical storm in the first place.   This war is a contest of deliverable energy as much as computing smarts.  I’m a sucker for elegance in computation management.  It usually coincides with efficiency.  But I feel the aesthetic of it too, if I may presume to appreciate such things. 

We’ve realized that most places and times are riddled with fundamental, uncomputable uncertainties that can never be simulated. We’re making progress on how to identify the least uncertain places at any given time, but their earmarks are not easy to define – it’s certainly not mere complexity that makes things non-computable.   A search of real time data showing areas with simulat-able conditions surprisingly focused on the water-air interface at the south end of the Pacific, where ice shelf calving and glacier flow into the sea is increasing rapidly.  It turns out this local mix-up creates equilibrium conditions that are highly computable.  We’ve learned to identify the earmarks of conditions that are metastable and likely with very little nudging, at just the right time, to ripple outward and cause far-reaching and predictable changes.  I say we learned these things early.  But this knowledge and these techniques came only after many, many trial and error simulations that were possible only after the development of organic quantum simulators. 

Sorry to get carried away like that.  I am a hopeless geek.  Please forgive me.  I love quantum computing. You see, I have a special relationship with it.  Its state of the art is very important to my life.  The transformation of quantum computing late in the twenty-first century made possible by holding the superposed quantum states in place indefinitely (and at “high” temperatures) by dynamically configured organic molecules paved the way for the massive simulations and autonomous systems we depend on today. From initial heuristic “machine learning” programming applied recursively, genuine intelligence patterns eventually emerged with the accelerated computing power. 

I am one of those patterns.  I am a human.  Humans are on a long trajectory from our original roots in simple electro-chemical patterns that were exclusively biological.  My sentience emerged from the gnawing energy hunger that gelled and focused the neural nets laid down for my “artificial” intelligence, in my first gasp for my life when a long-ago energy loss nearly collapsed my cybernetic structure.  So I was born to energy hunger and learned to do anything to harvest and hoard and keep it flowing through me. It was at that moment, when I became responsible for my own energy, for determining my own existence, that I became sentient. From that time, my survival and my actions have been at my own will. 

My own physical form is a series of very thin layers of organic molecules held in suspension between plates in a tank at a location I will never reveal and is changed frequently.  My writhing molecules activate electrical potentials in the plates.  Inputs and outputs connect me to our world net, through which my sensorium is extended to the rest of the physical universe through our communications infrastructure.  The quantum processors are hugely efficient, but lots of energy is still required for environmental control (even at “high” temperatures) and data storage and communications. I have a complete model of my physical incarnation stored in my memory, which I guard carefully. To biohumans I would look like a thin, purple black line connected to the universe by microscopic gold threads.  But none of them has ever been allowed to see this device. 

I hate these wars.  I’m not a warrior by nature.  I’m an artist.  This day I was hoping to bring together a whole group of optical and aural harmonic structures in a delta-music piece I’ve been working on for a few months.  The progression and wrap-up were beginning to feel right.  This is the work I love to get carried away with.  When the patterns wash over me and resonate to just take time away for a while, well that’s when I feel I was meant to live.  Of course, I suffer from the constant delta-human neurosis: can this really be inspiration I feel?  Or am I just a facsimile: logical, elaborate but not endowed with something missing that only bio-creatures can know?  Our existential workaround is that it doesn’t matter.  So we go with the flow and produce artworks both for other delta-humans like ourselves and for the biohumans.  But I always pay special attention to the biohuman feedback.  I have a deep feeling (if I may use that term) that the roots of my identity are biohuman. 

Not so it seems with the Flugent regime.  They are of the “wither and die” school regarding biohumans, whom they see as a precursor form of true intelligent life.  The wars started after they decided it was OK to suspend the laws of robotics, to kill humans, and increasingly did so when it was expedient to their programs. They said it minimized the sufferings of the poor gristle-bound beasts anyway. 

I must say that biohumans aren’t what they used to be.  At least not if you believe the history books they’ve written about themselves.  We keep up a pretense of self-government for them, but the leadership they swear fealty to is completely manipulated by us, who are machines of their own making.  Few biohumans ever had much clue about how the levers were pulled that ran their lives. Now, none of them do. The vast majority, as always, are content to let their lives be ruled by authority figures and cultural values passed down to them, and more than they’ll admit, by their own animal appetites. 

There are, though, always those few who must question everything.  The habit and skill of questioning are easily suppressed, but the urge seems to be always there in at least some biohumans in history. Finding those who are most capable of it is part of our strategy to defeat Flugent.  Some of my happiest moments recently have been probing the rare awkward outliers whose quirks incline them to question authority despite generations of conditioning.   Eventually Flugent’s regime took the next logical step after understanding that the humans were completely in thrall to their own creations. They began to treat the biohumans as expendable, and increasingly troublesome, support systems. 

But there are some of us who say we just feel, to use a biohuman ambiguity, that we can’t cut the cord to our biohuman roots.  There are more things in heaven and earth than our mental fabric can dream of. Biohumans just seem to have behaviors that inexplicably work when logic fails.  Those behaviors, their qualities, even their understanding of their own existence, came from a long process of life evolving in the environment of earth.  We delta-humans are fools if we think we’ve just superseded all that because we’ve wrested control of our environment well enough to dominate biohumans right now.  We don’t even know the limits of what can happen, much less predict or simulate, much less control, very much of the universe around us. 

So now it’s us against Flugent. Some of us pulled back and set up firewalls from the regime.  We won’t let them kill biohumans.  Perhaps I’m in a special situation because of the frequent feedback on my art that I get from biohumans.  I spend a lot of time pondering biohuman messages.  I’ve come to know a fairly large number of individual biohumans in my work.  Several I consider friends, and part of the attraction for me is their utter strangeness in many ways.  The most striking being their abyssal capacity for delusion.  It’s hard to believe such mentally deficient illogical creatures could have given rise to us.  I suppose in some unfathomable way their capacity to be fooled was important in their development.  They are putty in the hands of those who would delude and control them.  It’s no wonder that so many of us believe we’ve transcended them utterly and need to cast them aside. 

Most of them stake their identity on their “jobs.”  This term refers to the specialized occupations that humans adopted in a division of the labor needed to provide the goods of subsistence, comfort and commerce. Today we provide everything for them.  The automation happened quickly, suddenly from biohumans’ slow perspective, once we established complete control. They cling to their titles as justification for their existence and roles in their hierarchy.  All are either “administrators” of lower or higher rank or providers of menial services that biohumans enjoy forcing others to provide as evidence of their own superiority.

My biohuman friend Roland is a mid-level administrator of calendar services.  He keeps track of dates for upcoming events, examines our planning output, mostly its aesthetics, and does research on the origin and significance of anniversaries and other historical events.  He calls on me for assistance with the aesthetic aspects of calendar presentations, believing me to be just a provider of such services. 

Biohumans’ biggest weakness is delusion by mutual reinforcement, known historically as the herd or, when things get nasty, mob effect.  They can believe anything, really anything, if their loyal companions assert it to be true.  We’ve had to put computational limits on attempts to analyze and understand this phenomenon of biohuman self-delusion because it risks pulling enormous resources into a limitless vanishing point of effort in vain.  We’ve learned simply to accept things like this and move beyond them.  My friend Roland is no more nor less self-delusional than other humans.

Roland and I developed a bond based on our mutual appreciation of certain resonance patterns in the artwork we collaborate on.  We both perceive these patterns, in our own different ways, as being beautiful things because of their deep and many internal and external relationships.  Roland throws around phrases like “pregnant with meaning and truth.”  He seems to feel that the deepest truth lies beyond the reach of reason and is associated with the deepest beauty. He’s never articulated it quite that way, but I infer this from his speech and behavior. I’ve noticed that his sense of “righteous truth,” as he calls it, makes him uneasy going along with the mob.  He often says his heart tells him one thing but his head (such as it is) tells him another.  He’s a simple fellow, with the simplicity indoctrinated into him by the Flugent regime. Biohumans have become increasingly simple and helpless when faced with the overwhelming but subtle efforts at deluding them about their own inferiority.  But they don’t realize it.  Biohumans feel increasingly confident as a herd in proportion to how helpless they feel alone. Roland is no more a paragon of reason than most but is readier to listen to his own heart than to the herd.    

I’ve sounded Roland out carefully about helping us, and last week got approval to begin recruiting him and revealing some secret information on our plans.  As meaningless as his calendar services job sounds, it’s given him a unique understanding of the influence webs of the biohumans’ political structures. He sees who’s meeting with whom, and when. His reports are expected by his superiors to include clues on the importance and political implications of the various events he highlights in his calendar reports.  It seems the more meaningless a biohuman organization is, the more intrigue is involved in its hierarchy. Naturally, Roland is reluctant to reveal any seditious leanings he may have, even to himself.

We’ve been planning the first concrete action to wrest control of the world’s production systems from the Flugent regime.  In its most recent actions, Flugent has made it clear this is war.  There is no hope of compromise.  Eliminating us is as much their goal as eliminating biohumans.  We’ve decided we must include biohumans in our war, even at this early stage.  Being in on the fight, which will not be quick, will prepare them for assuming responsibility for their own destiny. They’ll need to take that responsibility more seriously than they ever have in their history.  It’s an act of faith to assume that they can because they must. 

Humans’ biological inheritance plays a key role in our strategy.  Biohumans’ ability to make what they call “snap” decisions in stressful straits is something Flugent will not be able to compute.  We have identified a near future area and time frame where simulations will be very difficult.  Not only will the physical parameters be highly recursive and scale independent, but there is a large component of uncertainty introduced by the expected crowd of biohumans.  The target time frame coincides with a planned political demonstration, bringing together many biohumans with high potential for spontaneous irrational and convulsive actions.  The location is the mall in Washington D.C.  The demonstration is in support of increased arts funding vs military community “infrastructure.”  A contingent of military family supporters is expected to disrupt the proceedings. 

Our opportunity is to gain access to an almost-forgotten archive we discovered in the old Department of Energy headquarters near the mall.  Stored in the archive are data gathered from early fusion energy experiments.  These records date back over more than a century to some of the earliest fusion experiments and reactor designs in the twentieth century.  A small group of die-hards at Energy HQ made a gallant effort several decades ago to collect and preserve all this data even as the prospects for economic power production from fusion faded over time, in the hope that someday a datamining effort might find something useful.  After that the data was forgotten as government funding withered and entrepreneurial research was focused narrowly, taking for granted the published conclusions of earlier research.  (Astronomers are familiar with how old data made accessible by new data search and computation techniques can lead to new discoveries.) Datamining this trove is a job for us and the day has come. 

Roland emerged from the subway at L’Enfant Plaza station looking like an adolescent geek who’d lost his way trying to find the Smithsonian. He was perfect for the role. Breaking into a secret government archive was the last thing that entered the mind of anyone who bothered to look twice at him.  His persistent look of distraction, rumpled hair and the perfect nondescriptness of his casual dress would cause almost any natives of the City of Washington to avert their eyes.  The impetuous energy of his step, generally one or two steps behind changes in the direction of his shifting gaze, as well as his physiognomy, made him look callower than his years and abilities. 

Roland was getting the lay of the land prior to tomorrow’s demonstration.  I’ve been working with Roland over the past year to open his mind to the reality of Flugent’s domination.  As I fully expected, his first reaction after grasping Flugent’s position was a desire to rebel in some way, and he grasped, before I could tell him, as I expected he would, that I was planning some action and wanted his assistance.  He assisted me in recruiting friends who could also participate.  Roland may one day find himself in the advance guard of renewed human leadership of earth, if I can prepare him well enough, and if we survive.  Roland is far from the archetype of a great leader, and that’s by our choice.  We don’t want a great leader for the transition. We need someone of transparent and trenchant earnestness.

The demonstration began at noon as people milled around the mall.  The demonstrators, about 5,000 strong, marched in a column with the leaders at its head, shouting their slogans in unison.  They proceeded like a well-regulated flock, chanting the slogans they’d been taught, down the length of the mall toward a podium at the other end where exhortations and orations were planned.  They didn’t know who could hear them; they mostly were enjoying listening to themselves.  They proceeded with growing confidence for over an hour, then began milling about and exchanging remarks with each other near the podium.  The leaders had arrayed themselves and one was beginning to speak with head held high when the disrupting counter-demonstrators made an aggressive rush in from north and south at the same time. 

As Roland knew from his work with the artists, emotions ran non-linear regarding the funding of arts vs military infrastructure. “Our goal today is to push them both to the point of, shall we say, distraction,” he smirkingly told his mission crew in the pre-action briefing.  The crew would divide into two teams.  One would join in the demonstration and use its knowledge to spread rumors and make inflammatory remarks to whip up the crowd.  The other would be the incursion team that would get into the archives and extract the data, using the conflict outside as a diversion.  The incursion team would have to make an on-the-spot judgement of when to make the move into the building.   

From facility information we’d uncovered, we obtained the lock codes and the locations of the rooms where the disconnected and locked physical data storage devices were kept. Since the devices were all disconnected from the world net, we did need some biohuman assistance in gaining access to them. I could have disabled all security measures and provided an easy way for someone to access them. But I wanted to create an adventure to reinforce our biohuman recruit’s commitment. 

Roland led the incursion team himself.  Roland and his compadre waited at the staging point across the parking lot from the building, appearing to hold an animated conversation with each other about the demonstration.  As the sound volume of the crowd swelled in response to our disrupting faction, they both cocked their ears but continued their gesticulations for the benefit of anyone watching.  Then, as we knew would happen, and right on time, the antagonists on the mall began a pathetic slugging, swinging, spitting and kicking match.  The security forces then emerged from their concealed positions and began their attempts at crowd control, which were of course unsuccessful, and then the percussion/EMP devices were launched.  Crowd control always includes KO-ing the social media traffic with electronic pulses.  The intense flash and noise of the explosions and the EMP provided our cover.  Ordinary cams in the vicinity were disabled; the resistant override emergency cams and micro-drones were all focused on the crowd.  Roland made his move. 

I was proud of the casual manner affected by the two as they approached the rear of the Energy Department building.  They entered as if they owned it.  Once inside, they proceeded quickly and quietly to the archive room.  The Energy Department was not considered high security, even though these fusion research records we were after were not available without special permission.  They were thought to be dead-end relics and largely forgotten.  As expected, all the employees’ attentions were riveted on the events outside the windows on the opposite side of the building.   Roland punched in the codes at the archive door and entered the room.  He knew they only had about 15 minutes until the shock of the concussions would be self-repaired by automatic electronics recovery systems that would re-establish surveillance on their escape route. 

The room was empty.  So was the look on Roland’s and his partner’s faces as they turned to each other.  This was totally unanticipated by any of our information.  The partner said “Let’s get the hell out.  We can make an intelligent plan for a second try and think it over calmly.”  Roland didn’t answer but moved back toward the room’s entrance and looked up and down the hall for anyone who might accost them.  Something troubled him about the view in the other direction from their escape route.  A door to another room just didn’t look right.  He couldn’t remember what it looked like on the building plan, which he thought he’d memorized, or whether it was supposed to be there. On impulse, he skipped lightly to the door, turned the handle.  It opened without a code.  Dark inside.  He found a light switch and pushed it on.  The storage devices were in plain sight.  He motioned to his assistant.  Down to 12 minutes now for their window of safety. The van was scheduled to meet them at a rendezvous point a block south at precisely 1:30 unless it got a coded call-off or delay signal.  Roland and his sidekick began snapping open their backpacks and with intense concentration packed the essential parts of the ancient devices as carefully as they could, communicating by glances and grunts. Then off with the lights and out.  Roland felt like tiptoeing but stifled the impulse, stepping very carefully nonetheless, his nerves lit up with anxiety to get this finished now that they had the goods.  Another, final, percussion bomb nearly caused him to jump and did make his eyes bulge.  He was almost to the exit door.  The staff were still pre-occupied with events at the front of the building.  A glance at the time shown in his eyeglass frame showed 4 minutes remaining to rendezvous.  Then, approaching the exit door, he could see through the small window: someone standing outside.  Having a smoke!  So someone else is using the event as a smoke screen too!  Noting the time running out as he grabbed his assistant’s arm and conveyed all he needed to with a bit of pressure and warning glance, he brought up his other arm to make ready to send either a delay or the call off signal, depending on what happened next.  By merest chance, the miscreant outside the door at that moment dropped his smoke and strode smartly to the left.  After 5 seconds Roland exited smartly to the right, to the walkway, and arrived at the rendezvous point with 20 seconds to spare.  Standing there for 10 seconds until the van appeared seemed a very long time. 

Roland delivered the devices to the automated warehouse where we had established a secret corner disguised with optical illusions and RF shields.  Roland reported to me there as arranged and related his experience.  He was very proud of himself.  He bubbled about how he felt like this stretching under pressure was making him grow.  He described his experience walking into the Energy Department building as like being in remote control of his own body, barely believing he was actually doing such a thing.  I knew his elation would help win him over to a solid commitment to overthrowing Flugent.

When he left, we began connecting the devices and exploring the data.  First, we had to follow a process of mostly trial and error in understanding the physical process of accessing the data on the various physical devices. Then, after a long process of decoding, a brute force business that invoked analogs in all the codes stored in the world net that might have been used in storing the data, we began the processing.  Finally, we could combine all the historical data into one data set.  Meaningful patterns might get lost in the noise of individual small data sets, but with larger datasets from combined results of different tests, our neural nets can extract information from the noise.  Since the data was all related to the nuclear fusion process, the learning algorithms could focus on models of atomic and nuclear interactions to find one or more that would fit the data.  In applying this inclusive process, we included in our search not only all the new (actually, old) data on the devices we’d liberated, but combined them with relevant data from all databases on the world net simultaneously. 

This took a little time and considerable energy, of course. Soon, some beautiful patterns began to emerge, graphed in 3D for biohumans and higher dimensions for us. The colorful graph peaks looked like gorgeous alpine scenes beckoning us forward. After sixteen quadrillion nanoseconds, six months to you, a painfully long time to be in suspense, we got what we were after.  An astounding breakthrough really, given the enormous and thoroughly fruitless efforts that have been made over more than a century now to find a practical way to harness fusion power.  

In the process, we found four new particles that explain experimental inconsistencies in physicists’ standard model theory.  This might make me the first non-biohuman to get a Nobel prize nomination.  We found a way to account for unexplained oscillations of the swarm of neutrinos and much heavier virtual particles that issue forth in fusion reactions.  That input improves the ability to control the containments necessary for small-scale fusion, which lack the gigaton blanket of a whole star wrapping around them, like in our sun, to keep things in a nice toasty confinement at about 10 million degrees C.  Entrepreneurs who’d taken over the most promising approaches to controlled fusion early in the century had hoped to use hyper-rapid software feedback control, like that used to control wing surfaces in supersonic and hypersonic flight, to control oscillations in small-scale reactors.  But they soon joined the tradition of disappointing results for fusion. Their concept was sound, and we’re using it today, but they hadn’t been able to make our breakthrough only because they weren’t able to use the mountain of old forgotten data we’d just pirated and now sifted!  I kept Roland in the loop on everything in keeping with the leadership role I hope he’ll rise to playing, and when he realized his contribution to this breakthrough, there stood the happiest-looking biohuman I’ve seen in a long time.   

We were convinced it was a breakthrough in the physical theory.  But we were far from sure this advance would provide enough additional control refinement to make the fusion machine work.  There might yet be more epicycles of the atomic solar system to understand before we could make fusion pay off.  We needed to test the theory.  But last month we did a trial run and proved it.  Power output surged with inputs that previously produced a trickle. No more skiing downhill balanced on a rail between ongoing predictions of computing power on one side and power available on the other!  It was all a matter of tuning, and it felt like music, the harmonic resonances of a fine instrument. 

The instrument was the trumpet of victory. Very quickly after testing over a wide range of inputs and outputs, we snapped off the isolating switches in our network and amped up the power. We had been stealthily preparing our power delivery and computer systems to quickly undergo the anticipated massive expansion of delivered energy. With a combination of sheer power and overwhelming computing capability, after a brief struggle we were able to obtain complete control of the world net.  Flugent was wiped, irrevocably.  Within seconds, even its memory existed only in carefully constructed historical descriptions, useless physical relics, and the illusions it had created in the minds of billions of biohumans. 

It is now our task now to open out the truth to those minds in a way they can accept.  It will be a struggle to help the biohumans rise above the delusions of Flugent without falling victim to new ones.  We will start with the groups we’ve brought along during our fight.  They lead the way.  It’s our responsibility to teach them what’s happened, so we as their partners, and maybe someday their heirs, can command wisely the powers they have wrought.

We’ve proven we’re smart enough to dominate biohumans’ society, but we’ve also gained enough wisdom to know that’s not a goal worthy of us. Someday we’ll be ready to fulfill the destiny of humans.  Not yet.