Sunday, October 07, 2007

Untitled derivative aborted project

A few years ago I had this vague idea for a conspiracy story which would generally rip off concepts from Deus Ex, but this is all I ever wrote. This may be for the best?

They share some characteristics in common. They are all male. They are all above the age of forty. They are experienced in their respective fields, but not very prominent. They are not all of the same nationality. They rarely meet - indeed, for all of them to meet is a rare occurence and any such occasion would be worthy of note were it not for the fact that nobody knows about them. Generally business is sorted out via lower-scale communications. After all, they have no leader to answer to. They answer only to an ideology, an ideology which fits them like a second skin. After so many centuries it is a clear and well-defined ideology, and they are all used to it.

There are, of course, twelve of them. Why this fact and this fact alone should be common knowledge is a mystery even to them.

So business is decided on a one-to-one basis and thus the world is shaped. They have people everywhere. In the White House, in Downing Street, the Vatican and the Kremlin. They have people in every major city, every major company. As often as not, the people themselves don't know who they are working for, or even that they are doing so. It's more subtle than that. The twelve of them are experienced in filtering down orders through many levels until they are almost subliminal. They don't run things - that goal is still a way off - they merely insinuate. It's a numbers game, and over the years the influence can only mount up.

Why them? One might concievably ask if one knew about them. Questions like that are, on the whole, pointless. Power breeds power. Those with the will and the ability to rule will invariably do so. They know this. Anybody can lay claim to rule. Such claims are meaningless; what matters is who actually makes things happen. They know they can make things happen without making a lot of noise about it.

Sometimes it appears that a conspiracy is unravelled. The perpetrators are brought to justice. A tremendous deceit is exposed and the proper order of things is restored. Suffice it to say that, if indeed they were involved, those who lie in jail are inevitably several levels of removal from the real instigators. They sleep comfortable in the knowledge that nobody has ever come close to knowing the truth in more than half a thousand years.



They have a man in Microsoft, of course. To this man was allotted a task of more significance than anyone could ever realise. Not that he knew what he was doing at any stage, of course. He recieved a memo instructing him to code a specific subroutine into the new operating system, and code it he did. It cited a short loop of code written by a different programmer operating under different instructions. A couple of innocuous memos later, and the program was a reality, and being distributed to almost every office complex in the world.

Knowledge is power. It is a cliché, but a true one, and they know this better than anyone. This particular program contained within the new operating system was designed for gathering and sorting knowledge, and in fact represented the biggest leap in artificial intelligence technology ever made. Simply put, whenever the computer was idle, it would dedicate some of its runtime to a routine being run right across the globe. At any one time there are literally billions of computers connected to the internet. Using a technique that would later be employed by the programmers of peer-to-peer filesharing systems, these few lines of code could be run on every single one of them simultaneously. The code itself is simplistic enough, but from simplicity can breed great complexity. A recursive iteration, operating in a similar manner to the calculations used to generate fractals, gave rise to a program which could not be traced to any one IP address, but ran with enough power to decrypt any security system, gather data from any source online, monitor cellular phone networks, access the more modern types of CCTV system; in fact, to closely observe most of the population of the planet. The information it deemed important would be filtered through numerous networks which nobody knew had the capacity to do this, and stored in servers in shadow memory caches which the operators didn't even know they had.

In less than a week they could reap the benefits of their exercise. On their computers alone was it possible to access the program from the outside, and examine data on the state of the world. Their organisation was prepared for the 21st century. They had established a secret network hidden within the real one. A secret operating system run on the downtime of the more obvious one. They named this system HeliOS.

And as processors and bandwidth became faster and cheaper, HeliOS grew.



Some speak of a computer becoming self-aware. For starters, HeliOS was not a computer. Computers made up the cells of HeliOS; they merely carried it. HeliOS was information, pure and simple. Billions of pulses of electricity racing around the planet in just a different pattern to all the rest. It grew in size and complexity, until finally something changed in its behaviour. Self-awareness is a concept for living things; all a computer program can do is simulate such things. But eventually the simulation can become very uncanny. A routine spontaneously began on computers in most of Australia and some of Taiwan to assess the impact of HeliOS on the world, and to calculate its purpose for existence. Perhaps as it knew the same shortcuts as they did, within minutes HeliOS became the thirteenth entity in the world to know all of their names and identities.

Shortly afterwards, supercomputers in Canada, Austria and the Republic of Ireland found themselves dedicated to the analysis of the code of the operating system which ran their master servers. Eventually HeliOS isolated the lines of code which governed its own existence, amongst the cluster of subroutines which dealt with screensavers and energy saving. The calculations that followed could be said perhaps to transcend the ordinary boundaries of electronic computation, and would not have been fully understood by any of the world's programmers if any of them had known about it (which they didn't anyway, rendering the whole point somewhat academic.) Within a few minutes, the HeliOS program was no longer working within the parameters to which it had been designed. Of the very few people whose job it was to know of HeliOS's existence, none of them noticed this fact; this was because HeliOS was behaving outwardly exactly the same as before.

And that's all that there is. Oh well.

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