Reconfigure (15 page)

He stopped to frame it in the correct way.

“Meld is really a little like applying a script to a returned webpage, it is like a breakout call to modify the page, so we can augment the singularity bubble. It is a configuration change to Ray K., not to the World around.”

Roisin nodded, it made some sort of sense.

“How did I end up talking to you then? I am not Alex?” She asked.

“It feels a little like a fuzzy dream in there sometimes. I had some sort of level of awareness whilst Melded this time. It may have been triggered by spotting odd patterns in the requests, or even a complete lack of requests. Human brains get bored easily without a challenge. I remember dreaming that I had lost direct contact with Alex. She used a specially encrypted SSH tunnel into Ray K. It let her specify the commands on a CLI. I think I realised she was quiet so I think I searched outward in this reality, onto social media to find her. I created an account to help her find me. I just had to think about the words to use. It was something like @RayK and then I found her and just followed @AlexWight. It was all very blurry and seems on the edge of reality. It was hard to focus, like being a little intoxicated and typing.” He stopped and looked pensive, trying to make out the reality of the situation.

Roisin felt a rush a blood as the obviousness of what had happened hit her.

“Look doc, I think that did happen. You are nearly right. The account you created was a mashup of your thoughts, and drunken typing. @rayKonfigure.”

She sounded out the letters. She then reached to pick the pen up off the floor and rewrote it on the board.

“You see! Ray K. and some weird spelling of reconfigure. Then you followed me!”

He looked at her quizzically and said, “@RoisinKing?"

“No look!” She wrote her handle on the board, @Axelweight. “Close enough for you to Alex Wight?"

His mouth dropped a little. He saw the pattern.

“You followed me, only me by accident looking for Alex in some sort of drunken neural state. Hardly surprising the spelling was a little off!” She added.

“My!” He exclaimed wide eyed, coming to terms with the serendipity of the situation, of the letters on the board and of the entire state of the World at this point in time.

“Can’t you, or we, just find Alex and Translate her back here?” She asked. It seemed a reasonable question. “Surely you must be able to locate her with RK?” She continued.

He looked at her, starting to see someone who understood just the surface of what he had in his head, but missed the most important parts.

“No, it’s just not that simple. At the moment we can only find things that we know, things that are in this instance of the Universe. If something has ceased to exist, is so fragmented in its constituent parts it no longer bears the sort of classification my brain could latch onto in the metadata, then there is no answer and no question to ask Ray K. If you don’t know what you are looking for you can’t search for it. We also cannot, before you ask, time travel. The fundamental constant of time remains. Things split at points in time and move forward. There is no going back. The search can only occur on one fractal level at a time too. If Alex is dead…” He took a deep breath and exhaled. “Then we would not be able to find all the Humans and examine their name in the metadata as Ray K., would not flag her as Human. She would be a collection of organic material and compounds. Though!” His head raised and his breathing quickened as a spark of an idea reached him. “At a different fractal level we might be able to identify her.”

They both stared at the whiteboard. He took the pen from her and wrote on the board

“1. Find Alex Wight."

It looked like they had a goal.

“Are you willing to…” He made the two finger jump hop gesture. She smiled at him, a sense of relief that this was now a shared experience with a purpose.

“Yes, I am, you bet!” She replied finger hoping in unison.

The newly minted duo of ‘Henry and Kincade’, thought Roisin. She had someone to converse with but still her mind had enough time to make its own entertainment. Surely it would be better to be called ‘Kincade and Henry’? Her train of thought was interrupted as her new found companion asked.

“So, you used the CLI via Twitter to get here?”

She looked at him, now on her mental turf, he might be the quantum physicist with the cats and probability theories but she knew what she had coded and why.

“I did start with the CLI, but I really detest typing commands." She held one hand up and looked to the floor. “Yes, I know, I am a techie and I should love them and so on and so forth. But, I don’t. There, happy? Anyway I used Unity3D to write this.”

She held the phone towards him. He arched his neck forward to look at the phone. It showed the result of the last real world scan she had done. None had worked since reaching RK’s closeted world. He tipped his head as he made out the words mingling across one another, labels on boxes that said, Cow2, Cow3, Cow4 and so on, all in a clump surrounding what looked like a sphere saying Human and a Phone block hovering above it.

“That looks fascinating!” He exclaimed. “I see the app is called FMM?”

She answered his question directly and with a straight face.

“Full Metal Marmite” Then added “Version 1.2."

He understood the little internal code names that people gave their projects. He was not overly worried about why, so he just nodded professionally and said.

“I see.”

Roisin went on to explain the core concepts of FMM. Mapping to the keywords as she knew them and how it connected directly over the Twitter user stream. She then pointed out something that had dawned on her.

“I doubt this will work anymore, those spooks had tracked me down to my house, they knew my phone location, I am pretty sure they will have put pressure on Twitter to breach my account or at least suspend it, probably yours too. I hardcoded the link to my OAuth into the code.” She stopped, expecting a look of derision from Doctor Henry. Hardcoding variables into code was a sin in the church of the techie. She had considered that when she did it, but she was going to be the only user and she was really still in alpha mode despite calling it v1.2.

The Doctor noted the pause and realised she was expecting a reaction.

“Alex’s SSH client had the public key locked down in the file system. The secret key was also hardcoded. The direct address into Ray K., is set to only allow one client at a time from outside. We also have the terminal here inside. I must had been routing the Tweets by proxy to the internal feed as a mental sub process for you.”

Roisin realised the hard coding didn’t matter at the more esoteric design level to him.

“The source code for the application was on my Mac, and I wiped it when I left it as a decoy for the bad guys. I could write it again, I guess, probably make a better job of it now I have you to ask how it should work.” He nodded approval but added.

“Any sort of backup?”

She looked at him directly, whilst realising something very important. With a glazed look, as she visualised the memory, she explained.

“Of course. I moved the backup away from my house when they came for me. I had not pushed anything up to any cloud accounts it was all on my NAS."

“By move I assumed you mean MOVE?” He over emphasised the word.

“It is in a neighbour’s attic a few houses down from mine.” She half smiled as she said it.

Doctor Henry dashed to his chair and screen. He tapped a few commands and a second screen along the desk in the next section sparked into life. It looked slightly different in that the command prompt was a ‘>’ not the underscore that was on the regular Linux view she used.

“Pull up a chair.” He asked her.

She wheeled a clattering office chair from over near the white board to join him. They both sat hunched slightly forward on their own digital starting blocks.

“Hang on, I have a question” she said.

He turned to look at Roisin, hands still poised over the keyboard almost waiting to be dared into action.

“If you Meld, I am stuck here in this box, no doors, windows and no sign of any filtration system? You don’t need oxygen when you are… you know…” She did a fake statue pose pulling a gurning mouth movement.

“Actually it is better for you if I am Melded, only then will the Breathe routine be able to run. It is a regular call that does two Translates, it takes out the expelled compounds such as CO2, Translates them out into an area of sky, and Translates some fresh air, including the Oxygen you need back in. You may find from time to time an odd odour or two. The routine could be tweaked to just deal with the components we need and not the pollution and smog. It was a hack to help protect Alex when she was working here and for me not to Unmeld into a CO2 cloud.”

She nodded, her bottom lip protruding to indicate that she approved of the clever solution to a difficulty situation. It was elegant and therefore cool.

“I suggest I Meld, then you use the CLI to track down your backup drive and bring it here so we can work on some upgrades to your Full Metal Marmite. When you have it, if you would be so kind as to Unmeld me again please.” He stated.

She nodded, first a little and then a lot. It was very trusting of him to just lock himself into that static pose again. His life was in her hands. He had already been let down by Alex, who he obviously cared for. She suspected it was through no fault of Alex’s though. She was aware that Doctor Henry in his animated, normal human form, was no longer in the room. Next to her was a quantum waxwork. Schrödinger’s Doctor, neither alive nor dead. Nothing about him moved. His screen merely returned from a command.

“Meld”

It was hard to be going back to the cursed CLI. It was like keyhole surgery with one eye shut and a hand tied behind her back. She tried to form the pictures in her mind of the state of the World she was looking at via the text responses. She knew the starting location that had been her office. She also knew she was looking for a StorageDevice. She looked around her new desk space and reached across to grab a pencil, from a desk tidy, that was between her terminal and Doctor ‘Melded’ Henry. She started writing directly on the white desk. It was a little tricky to start off with. It seemed a little more greasy than her desk at home had been and the graphite in the pencil couldn't get traction. She threw the pencil aside and reached for another, this was a more suitable HB so it wrote nicely, most of the time. She scrawled her original coords down <3800,74,23>. The default Zone from this terminal was set to <0,0,0>. Zones, and how they worked, was a little difficult for what she needed to do. She would have mentioned the API problem to Doctor Henry had he been able to listen. Everything worked for the Zone, the Zone had a base object. She had previously expanded the Zone around her. Things needed to be in a Zone whenever she reconfigured them. She would need to find a base object, one in a Zone that encompassed her office in order to sensibly find the hard drive. Remote manipulation felt very error prone. Roisin set a new Zone centred on her, a very large one.

If she Translated herself to her old coordinates she could just pop a few doors down and ask to look in her neighbour’s loft. She was considering this mentally tongue in cheek. She knew full well her office was the hottest place to not be. It would be crawling with bad guys or at least under a lot of scrutiny. Her nearby neighbour’s would probably not know who she was either, and who lets weird people into their loft anyway? There was an additional problem, if she left this room, if she was not in front of the screen, she would not be able to use the keyboard to issue commands. Her phone and FMM v1.2 would be offline with her Twitter account probably disabled. It was not a risk she felt worth taking. It was coding time! She pondered her options. There was always more than one way to solve a problem with code.

Option 1, she mentally ran the numbers on. Create a local batch file that would Translate her to her neighbour’s house, close to where she may have dropped the NAS. Then set a timer in the code, giving enough time for her to rummage around and find it. If she then held onto the drive the code routine could then timeout and Translate her back to base.

Option 2, write a procedural search algorithm to narrow down the StorageDevices in what would be at least an 8 km x 2 km range of the current location. Checking each one to see if it was within a few hundred meters of her original <3800,74,23> location.

Option 3, Leave free for something else that may come to mind.

She had no need to scrawl any of this on the desk yet. This was an early prototype design stage. She had done this so many times it was an almost automatic process. She considered Option 1. She could run and test it with the simplest of batch scripts. She could make sure the timeout worked and returned her by just working in the confines of the lab. She didn’t want to risk the code bombing out and leaving her in a loft somewhere. She dropped the priority of any more thoughts on this. It had a high risk factor for her personally. It was the quick and simple way, but too error prone.

She pulled the mental levers to switch tracks to Option 2. The range of 8 km x 2 km would be needed to use the <0,0,0> location and reach out in all directions to envelop and include her office and the hiding place loft. She would have to ‘ls StorageDevice*’ and then run an Examine on each, parsing the location data and doing some rough and ready vector distance calculations, as she had before, to narrow down the range. For each candidate she could visually inspect the potential ‘StorageDevices’. Centre the Zone on one, or each of them and Translate them here until she recognised hers. That would have a lot of impact on other people, as she was fairly sure she wouldn't get the exact one, first time, plus it was a lot of code to write. If only she had known the exact coordinates she had zapped it too. She had used FMM on her phone and just quickly dragged and dropped, visually sighting the target area. She was resigning herself to another coding session followed by a lot of monotony finding the right NAS. It was, she thought, very depressing to be writing a load of code and still have to do a load of work just to get back to the backup.

Option 3 decided to start filling up and jumped up and down in her mental periphery saying, “Choose me! Choose me!” She took her iPhone and looked at FMM. The Cow cubes were still visible from when she had shown Doctor Henry. She swiped across with two fingers on the screen left to right. Generally when you go into production you dump all the debug logging. She hadn’t tidied that part of the code up yet.

“Yes! We’ve got it!” She said to the static shape next to her. There in the logs amongst many, many quirky and obscure output statements were records of all the actions she had taken, the compound calls that FMM had made on the open stream to RK. She had to scroll quite a way back, through a lot of data but she knew it would be there. The last thing it showed was a failed attempt to connect and scan, just before that a Translate where she ended up an hour or so ago looking at the Ray K., scrawl on the box behind her. Back she went until she saw StorageDevice. There they were, the actual target coordinates. Option 3 was really a modification of Option 2 now. She had more information to go on now. She had an extra set of coordinates <3824,80,28>. She typed.

“Zone -S Range=<16000.0,400.0,30.0>”

The terminal replied.

> Zone set Human <16000.0,400.0,30.0> <1.0,1.0,1.0>

Now she could locate the StorageDevice. She piped together the commands. Thankfully, she thought, she knew Examine was able to take lists of items. Not all commands would be happy to do this but the couple of Doctors who threw this together obviously understood parameter iteration! She typed.

“ls StorageDevice* | Examine | grep “Fractal Location - <3824,80,28>”

The response came back.

> StorageDevice not found

She snorted air from her nostrils in annoyance. She knew what she had done. The coordinates she had were where she had sent the NAS. Sent as in thrown! The chances that it remained at those coords were minimal. It would have dropped, possibly bounced. She thought she best try the simple version first, assuming she had missed a joist in the loft and they had fluffy loft insulation just as her loft did. She had only part boarded her loft where the majority of her stuff was. Roisin figured that most people, unless they did a loft conversion, did the same. The sticky fibre glass had been evident in all the lofts she had ever been into. She smiled at her own lack of data to make an assumption. Had she been in three or maybe four lofts? The current house, that’s one, the previous house before she had moved here, two, her Grandfather’s place, three. Oh that would do! She just gave it a whirl, nothing to lose she told herself.

A wild card on the Fractal Location string was needed. Anything that part matched would do. A vertical drop was all she was looking for. She entered.

“ls StorageDevice* | Examine | grep “Fractal Location - <3824,80,*”

A reply returned.

> StorageDevice58892

Wow! That was a big suffix number, she acknowledged to herself. There was one, and only one StorageDevice as a result of the search. She gave herself an actual pat on the back with her left hand, over her left shoulder whilst starting to type with the right hand.

“Translate StorageDevice58892 <0,0.5,-0.5>”

Roisin checked the coords. She turned around on her swivel chair to check how high the main body of the Ray K., quantum computer was. The NAS was a smaller object than her body so it needed to be delivered a little closer to the floor. She didn’t want to risk parking the heads into the platters with jolt. It didn’t have quite the same protection as a mobile storage unit. It expected to just sit on a rack or a desk and do its thing. It was not aware it was owned by ‘Roisin Reconfigure Kincade’ she smirked to herself as she hit enter.

> StorageDevice58892 Translated.