FLASHed

14. Zeus Lives

It seemed that he had the perfect job, for him: the graveyard shift at the 24/7 gas station. I used to see him every now and again when on my nightly all-nighter I'd run out of cigarette papers and have to pull myself away from coding temporal programming frameworks. I'd daze into the store, and he would be there, stuck deep in some cerebral engagement. He knew me, so would finish what he was doing on his notebook computer before reaching behind him to grab the little red and white packet of papers and toss them on the counter. I'd pass him a dollar, and he'd drop the change down with a click, I couldn't help notice his long pointed fingernails, incubators for bacteria multiplying within a load of snot and other gunky dirt that was stuck in there. He didn't care. He had the game. He had a job to pay the bills.

On our semi-regular encounters, neither of us would feel compelled to enter into any social discourse; that psychological need long deadened in both of us by higher urges. But on this one night, I'd had a bad time in my world of code, so needed some fellow-geek affirmation.

Me and Axel had been riding high for weeks on the publication of a paper on Axel's framework in the Journal of Cybernetic Culture. It was as if the recognition of Axel's brilliance and our efforts over the past two years would finally hit the undercurrents of early adopters--hackers who would take the ideas and run with them. But, instead of acceptance, we were hit with a wave of trolls who had missed the point, and instead, tried to compare our work with mainstream frameworks. Professor Biggs, who led the research team that wrote the paper, shouldn't have said the framework would revolutionise the way that machines work. People hate change. People hate.

In response to what I now, years later, recognise as depression. I was chain smoking (shorter links than usual) and, on this one night had run out of tobacco early. I also needed more coke which I'd been drinking by the bucket load.

At the servo, Robb (yeah, the servo man had a name), was tapping away at his keyboard. I grabbed some drink from the cool isle and waited for his attention. "Hey, I'm out of smokes too, Ruby." He rolled his eyes because he had to move his fat arse off the stool to get the tobacco. I waited for his back to be turned before I unleashed my need for personal interaction. "So, how's the game going?"

I remember clearly, he turned and with the soft packet in his hand, leaned with both arms on the counter top and there he eyed me for what seemed a minute as he decided if he would accept my invitation for conversation.

"Not bad." He finally said. "I made L45 in the last period. The alliance is working out pretty well, getting access to some cool upgrades".

"Cool", I replied nodding and paid for my goods with the card. I was about to leave when I had an idea, "In the game you can write your own mods can't you?"

"Yeah. It's a lot of work, and there's not much benefit in using custom mods over built-in ones. Let's face it, the AI in the game is pretty damn impressive, there's not much a hacker could do to enhance gameplay beyond what the machine can already do."

He hadn't told me anything new, after all, I knew the game pretty well also even though I hadn't yet hit L10. The game was a commercial product so hadn't considered the Environment as an opportunity for our framework. But, then there was that moment that every programmer experiences at least once in their life -- the feeling of technical opportunity.

"So, the big thing in the game is exchanging mats for transforming data packets. Right?"

"Yup."

"What if you had a mod that could do the transforming, rather than using built-in routines?"

"Like I said, how would you compete with the efficiency of the AI. It sound's like a complete waste of time to me."

It was time to share my work with Robb; I felt like that, If ever I had an opportunity to get our framework into the real world, that was now. "What if I could bring a framework to the game, a mod that would introduce it's own AI, but not just any AI, an AI whose processing memory was based on temporal state. A mod with a neural memory built into its runtime that would never forget anything and could potentially, learn anything. In fact, I'm not talking AI, my partner Axel says this framework, in the right environment, is the key to synthetic sentience.

Robb simply replied, "It sounds like a lot of work, but I'm interested."

That was years ago. Initially, Axel resisted the idea that the future of her invention was embedded within a commercial product. But a few weeks of hard prototyping showed potential. We called the mod the Zeus process and were able to improve Robb's levelling ability above standard AI within months. But it wasn't until we hooked the mod up to the quantum node at Professor Biggs' university that Zeus was able to shine.

Robb has since quit his job at the gas station and maxed out his in-game level to become a Game Master. Zeus spread throughout the userbase as the preferred pax processor and is being hired by the company and real world systems to solve real-world problems; which is good for me because I was diagnosed with cancer from smoking cigarettes and drinking too many carbonated sugar drinks. Zeus designed a protein that ate my tumour, so all good.

They don't speak much, but based on the images that they produce; it's clear that Zeus lives. 

fin.

(approx. 970 words)

<◕.◕> First published here, Jan 20, 2016. 

<◕.◕> March 2023: The Zeus processor is a character in 'Unholy Star'... I guess this is an origin story (although I have a feeling that this was written before that story was started).