Once upon a time, there was an ant named Saskatchewan. One day, it occurred to him that he was tired of being an ant. So he left his anthill, along with his 100,000 relatives and friends, and went off to see what else there was for him to be.

He tried to be a grasshopper. He painted himself green, and coiled himself up to jump with all his might. He hurtled through the air and landed about a quarter of an inch from where he’d started – less than his own body length. He tried all afternoon, but he just got more and more tired, until he couldn’t even get off the ground anymore. When the green paint began to wear off, he took it as a sign, and moved on.

He tried to be a centipede. He spent three days fashioning extra legs from tiny twigs and pieces of grass. But, try as he might, he couldn’t get them to work properly, and he couldn’t get them to attach to his body. He took days to heal from some of the attempts to attach them. When he gave up, he decided he was also dead set against trying to be a millipede.

So Saskatchewan kept moving, finding food where he might as he traveled between grass and trees, under fences, past the vast and mysterious dwellings of the humans. He thought about being a human, but he couldn’t stand on his hind legs, and had too many legs, anyway.

He also thought of being a dog – an easy life, he thought; humans fed them, sheltered them, and cherished them. He made some floppy ears and a tail out of grass, and frolicked around, making a tiny squeak in his best imitation of a bark. For the most part, however, he couldn’t even get a human’s attention – and, the one time when he did, he escaped being squashed by an enormous leather-covered foot by only the narrowest of margins. He decided to stay out of the human world, and not be any animal associated with humans.

Saskatchewan was becoming very discouraged. As he wandered, he began to make fewer and fewer attempts to be something else. But, one day, he came upon a hill of red ants. He paused to watch them, still unseen himself. How happy they seemed! Being a black ant himself, he had never thought about how the red ants lived. But these red ants went merrily about their duties, each doing his or her part to keep the hill well built and well fed.

He couldn’t exactly put a feeler on what the difference was between this red colony and the black one he had left behind. They did not even give any outward sign that they were happier, unless it was in some subtlety in their movement. But Saskatchewan did not think to question his impression. The red ants were happier, and he knew it. And he wanted to be one of them. Maybe, he thought, he had simply been tired of being a black ant.

He also didn’t think to find red paint for himself, but his first meeting might have gone better if he had. He walked up to introduce himself to the hill. Just as he was about to greet one of the ants hauling food toward the hill’s small opening, he recognized a change in the behavior of the ants. The change rippled through the crowd like a wave. It triggered an alarm within Saskatchewan, himself.

“Intruder!” he thought to himself. He looked around to find the intruder – by the nature of the alarm, another insect, about ant-sized, who would make off with their food or a few ants if not dealt with instantly. This, he thought, was a perfect opportunity to prove himself to the new hill. He had traveled far, and he had become resourceful and strong. All he had to do was find this intruder and attack it.

Before he had time to think further, six red ants fell upon him and began to tear and bite at him savagely. One of his legs was bent to nearly the breaking point, and the pincers on one ant were ready to break through his tough outer skeleton. Saskatchewan had to move very quickly, and, despite the resourcefulness he had just been reflecting on, barely escaped with his life. He threw off his attackers, and then fled as quickly as he could on four good legs, fending off red attackers as they caught up. Finally, he passed an invisible line, and the red ants broke off their pursuit. Saskatchewan collapsed in a heap, and did not move for a long time.

When he did move again, he almost wished that he couldn’t. He walked because he had nothing else to do. He felt very foolish. He, himself, had been involved in protecting his hill from intruders, and a good number of them had been red ants. He should have known it would be no different with a black ant approaching a red hill. But his foolishness was only the tiniest part of what bothered him. It was finally beginning to hit him that he could never stop being an ant. If he couldn’t even be a red ant, what were his chances of being a squirrel or a spider? He was an ant, and he could never, never change that.

So he walked on. His legs healed, but he didn’t really care. When he found food, he ate halfheartedly. He’d found many types of food he had never known about before, and had found many others that it was best to avoid. He walked on for days, or months, or years; he had no way to know, and no reason to mark time. The scenery changed around him; there were fewer houses and fences, and more trees. Still, he took little note.

He passed many anthills along the way, too. He gave the red ants a wide berth, and all the other anthills seemed just like the one he’d left, as if he had never gone anywhere. But, one day, Saskatchewan happened upon a struggling anthill. There couldn’t have been more than a few hundred ants, and they appeared to be starving. They were also walking right past all kinds of food, more than they could possibly eat. He was puzzled by this until he remembered that he hadn’t known about most of this food before his travels.

So he plucked a bit of what was most plentiful, approached a nearby ant, and ate the food. A group of ants gathered around and stared. They each tried some, and then promptly formed a trail to carry food back into the hill. He had made quite a first impression, and a good one, this time.

There were so many things these ants didn’t know, and so many ways he could help them that he decided to stay for a while. In the end, he made that colony his home, and was their chief food-finding scout, in addition to being a leading defense strategist. The colony grew and prospered. In his new home, were so many different things for him to do that he never got tired of being an ant again.

This is the contents of an email I composed soon after arriving at work on May 7, 2004.  My son David was ten at the time, soon to be eleven.  My daughter Dani had been in the orphanage for two days, but we didn’t know her yet.  We were still a family of three.

I was not usually the one to take David to school.  I was usually at work by the time school started, and I picked him up from an after-school day care.  But, for reasons lost in the mists of time, May 7 was different, or this post wouldn’t exist.  The text has been preserved from that time, math errors intact.

 ——————————————————————

 In the car, David asked me if anybody had a googol dollars.  I said, “No, nobody has a googol dollars.”

“Is there a googol dollars in the whole world?”

“No, there’s not a googol dollars in the whole world, even if you took every kind of money and converted it to dollars.  In fact, there wouldn’t even be a googol cents.”

So, he indicated that there might be a googol dollars in a few years, and I said no.  Not if the US Treasury printed hundred dollar bills as fast as it could.  Not if they built a new skyscraper just for printing hundred dollar bills.

“What about if they had a hundred skyscrapers?”

“Still not enough.”

“What if they had a billion years?”

I paused.  “I’ll have to think about that,” I said.  “I’ll have an answer for you when I pick you up today.”

“No, make it a hundred skyscrapers in each state.”

“Okay, how many stories on each skyscraper?  A hundred?”

“Yeah, a hundred.”

“Okay.”

“But what if the government owed somebody a googol dollars?”

“It would be fake, because nothing in the world is worth a googol dollars.”

“What if it was a bunch of things?”

“The whole world together isn’t worth a googol dollars.”

“So you could buy the whole world for a googol dollars?”

It was time for him to get out of the car, so I just said “Yes”, as he left, then said, “Bye.”

And he toddled off into that school.

So, on the way to work, I worked on it.  It went something like this:

We have, maybe a hundred printing presses on a floor, and a hundred floors — ten thousand printing presses per building.

We have a five thousand buildings in the United States (fifty times a hundred) — fifty million printing presses in the United States.

Maybe each printing press can print a thousand hundred-dollar bills per second. — fifty billion hundred dollar bills per second — five trillion dollars per second.

Five times six is thirty, so we have thirty trillion times ten — three hundred trillion dollars per minute.

Three times six is eighteen, so we have eighteen hundred trillion times ten — eighteen quadrillion dollars per hour.

With 25 hours a day (easier to multiply in your head), that makes eighteen hundred quadrillion divided by four — nine hundred quadrillion, four hundred fifty quadrillion dollars per day.

Similarly, we’ll allow 400 days per year.  Back to eighteen hundred, times a hundred more, eighteen thousand — which makes eighteen quintillion dollars a year.

Now, in a billion years, we just add three more groups of zeros — sextillion, septillion, octillion — eighteen octillion dollars.

Funny, I got eight octillion in the car.  Must have lost the leading one somewhere.

But the result is the same.  That is, I believe, this number:

     18,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 — that is, eighteen times ten to the twenty-seventh power.

That’s nothing close to this number:

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 — that is, ten to the hundredth power.

It takes a lot to get through a hundred orders of magnitude.

Make them trillion dollar bills, and you only get another ten digits. You’re up to the thirty-seventh power.  Make the presses print a trillion bills a second, and you add nine more — forty-six digits.  Make it five trillion buildings, which I think would pretty much cover the planet, and give each one a trillion stories, and you have nineteen more to add to the total — sixty-five.  Have a trillion planets in a trillion galaxies doing the same thing, and you add 24 digits to the total — eighty-nine.  Let’s squeeze that ten out of eighteen, and we’re up to 1.8 times ten to the ninetieth power.

So, let’s harness the power of ten billion parallel universes, and we’re pretty much there.  Over a googol dollars could be printed in a billion years if you had ten billion parallel universes, each with a trillion galaxies, each with a trillion planets, each with five trillion trillion-story buildings with a hundred printing presses on each floor, each printing trillion-dollar bills at a rate of a trillion per second.

I thought I’d let you know so one of us would remember to give David the answer.

Aren’t numbers fun?

Long ago, in the days when trains were driven by steam and engines had personality, there was a particularly cheerful engine named Tommy.  Tommy was a light, small engine, used mostly to pull passenger trains.  He was dwarfed by the huge freight engines that puffed proudly around the train station, but he was happy with his job, and did it very well.  Trains that he pulled always seemed to run on time.  He had the spunk and energy needed to make up for a late start, and the endurance to lead passengers on a long journey, and make it a pleasant experience for all concerned.  Even some of the passengers knew Tommy, and smiled when they saw him.

Now, one day, there was a big storm to the south, and large cities were laid to the ground.  Trains from everywhere around hauled enormous shipments of wood, brick, steel, and stone down to the areas that needed them most.  So it happened that, when a large shipment of medicine and fresh water was prepared for the people who had been sleeping outside, bitten by mosquitoes and bothered by rats, none of the large, proud freight engines were left to pull it.  In fact, only Tommy was left, and so he was hitched to the front of that train.

The load was lightened as much as it could be without removing vital medicine.  A missing vial of penicillin or quinine could easily mean a lost life — and the tanks of fresh water in the shipment were even more vital.  Tommy quivered as he started forward.  It was easily the heaviest train he had ever had to pull, and this was no easy haul across town.  The engineers and loaders all smiled, and said, “You can do it, Tommy!” as he pulled slowly, very very slowly, out of the station — but, behind their smiles, you could see there was worry in their eyes.

Tommy pulled and pulled, and with each chug of his piston, with each hiss of steam, the train went a little faster.  He learned the art of anticipating hills — building up speed before he came to them, so that his burden could help him over the top.  He managed more than half of his journey in this fashion, and was still going strong.  Yet the worry in the engineers’ eyes did not diminish, and he soon found out why.  Before him loomed an enormous mountain, with almost a straight run all the way to the top.

He started building up speed, knowing he would need everything he had to pull himself up over this mountain.  This got him over the foothills, and he always came down each hill with a bit of extra speed — but they did not allow him a steady buildup of momentum.

Tommy came to the base of the mountain itself with a good burst of speed from the last foothill, his fires white hot, and feeling ready for anything.  And so it was that the last car in the train was a hundred feet up the mountain before he even felt its weight pulling him down.   He was five hundred feet up the side of the mountain, almost half way, before he even slowed down.  And so began a slow and steady struggle against gravity, and Tommy knew it was going to take everything he had to pull himself over this mountain.

Even in those days, when people might still smile at a steam engine, or feel its presence, people and steam engines did not talk to each other.  Yet, in the slow, rhythmic labor of the cylinder and the steam, everyone on board seemed to hear him saying, “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can…” over and over, grim determination and quiet optimism fighting together to marshal every last bit of strength the little engine had.

Tommy was running hotter and hotter.  They started to bring water from the drinking water tanks in back to cool him.  “I … think … I … can … I … THINK … I … can …”  The water would sizzle into steam the second it touched his overheated surface.  Gears inside seemed to grind against one another, perhaps from the strain, or the heat expansion, or even the danger of melting. “I ….. think ….. I ….. can …..”  There were only 200 feet left to go, but it felt like a mile to the crew.  “I ….. think ….. I ….. can …..”  Anyone not immediately necessary to keep the engine running hopped off, and walked alongside.  It didn’t take much to match Tommy’s speed at this point.  It made almost no difference to the weight of the train.  “I … think.”  Hiss.  Grind.  Chug.  “I … can”

One hundred feet left to go.  The smell of burning oil filled the air.  Black smoke joined the steam spouting up from Tommy’s stack.  Covered in a solid coat of black soot, Tommy looked grim indeed.  His optimism was gone, and his resolve was fading.  Every turn of his wheels was a deeply painful struggle.  Yet, through it all, the crew walking along the tracks heard, “I … … … THINK … … … I … … … can …”  Tears came to their eyes.  They had never seen such bravery in man or machine.

There was an enormous hiss as Tommy reached the peak of the mountain.  He started down the other side.  The weight of the cars  still pulled hard behind him. “I … THINK … I … can …” The words were harder to hear.  They seemed muffled.  The hiss continued.  Yet, for the first time, human eyes began to glisten with a glimmer of hope.

With an enormous crack that sounded like a gunshot, Tommy’s piston rod snapped in two.  Inside the cylinder, his piston seized, then fused into place with half-molten steel.  Forward progress stopped instantly, and he began to be pulled back over the peak.  Everyone walking alongside scrambled back on board to apply brakes and try to slow their descent backwards down the mountain.  Although Tommy’s power had been totally disengaged, much of his mechanism was still moved by the turning wheels, and everyone on board felt they could hear him say, “I … THOUGHT … I  … could … I … THOUGHT … I could …”

Putting on the brakes seemed to do almost no good, though there’s little doubt the train would have careened out of control without them.  As it was, it built up speed all the way down the mountain.  “I thought  I could I thought  I could Ithought IcouldIthoughtIcouldI…”  There was another loud crack, and Tommy’s voice fell silent.  His wheels had seized up, and nobody ever heard another word from him again.  Sparks flew as the stationary wheels were dragged down the track.  About fifty feet up the mountain, Tommy stopped.  The brakes and the nearest foothill had done their work to stop the cars which had been so relentless in pulling him down.  Not a single human had been injured.

As Tommy cooled enough that the engineers could take a look, they stared and shook their heads.  There was almost nothing inside to be salvaged.  Heat and friction had ravaged his inner workings, and it was all they could do to disengage and free his wheels so that he could be pulled back to the station.  They had to use saws, axes, crowbars, and even the odd shovel.

It was another day before a freight engine could be brought to push the load over the mountain.  The big freight engine pushed all the cars and Tommy, and also pulled its own load, without missing a beat.  The medicine and water were well received and saved many lives.  With all the traffic in empty cars leaving the struggling town, an engine was found to haul Tommy back to his home station that very day.  As Tommy ascended that mountain for the last time and descended the other side, nothing was heard but the inanimate sound of his wheels spinning along the track.

Tommy was pulled to an empty, unused part of the station, where very few came to look at him.  Few, indeed, knew he was there.  Every once in a while, a passenger would ask, “Whatever happened to old Tommy?  He always added an extra spark to my day when he pulled my train into town.”  Then, the engineer would smile a sad smile, and tell Tommy’s story, and point off to the place where Tommy had been laid to rest.

Those who did go to visit Tommy found him just off the end of the tracks in the southwest corner of the station.  Trees grew around him, as if to shelter him from the rain; yet he was covered in rust.  Someone had carved a wooden sign and pounded it into the ground between Tommy and the station.  The sign said:

Tommy The Engine,
With the Heart of a Hero,
Gave His All on the Mountain.
He Thought He Could.

Tommy and that sign stand there to this day, both much decayed by the passage of time.  But go see it if you can.  It will bring a tear to your eye.

”It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea, than that he would cause one of these little ones to stumble. (Luke 17:2, New American Standard Bible) This post may be hazardous to your faith.  Please proceed with caution.

In visions long ago, I saw a room, much like an executive office, suffused in bright white light, almost too bright to look at.  Into that office walked a young version of my mother, just thirty-five years old at the time, her face filled with quiet concern.  Before she spoke a word, I knew where she was.

She was in Heaven.  When she had died was not apparent, and I drew no conclusions from how young she looked.  In heaven, if she wanted to be young, I guess she’d be young.  I also knew where she was in Heaven.  She was visiting God.  This was where God met those who wanted to meet with Him – where he held “office hours”, I guess.  How much of that room was a physical part of Heaven, and how much was symbolic, was of no concern to me.

God was not visible, but was clearly present in the room.  When my mother spoke, God’s voice answered.  It was a deep, male voice, straight out of the movies.  She spoke first.  “I’ve been waiting for my son,” she said.  “I’ve been patient.  But he should be here by now.”

There was a long pause.  Finally, God replied, “Yes, not too long ago, your son left the world.”

“Then let me see him, please,” she replied.

There was a shorter pause, then, “You don’t want to see him, my sweet child.”

“I have to see him.  He’s my son.  I can’t be happy not knowing.”

“Very well,” God said, relenting.  There was a small door in the middle of one of the office walls, toward the bottom.  It resembled the door to a crawl space on a house, and was no taller.  God caused the door to open.

Inside, it was dark.  A single figure was visible inside, as a silhouette outlined by yellow flame.  His eyes were flame.  His hair was flame.  His mouth was a gaping black hole surrounded by a beard and moustache of flame.  He was writhing in agony, and seemed completely unaware that the door had been opened.  He was an adult version of me.  Even behind the moustache and beard, and even with the dark spaces between the flames, the face was unmistakable, like an animated line drawing in burning yellow.

The door was closed.  My mother walked away in peaceful silence.  I don’t know how bad being in Heaven allowed her to feel.  But it didn’t matter, because I always woke up at that point, ending the dream and any need to develop the story further.

(more…)

Luke 17:2 reads: “It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea, than that he would cause one of these little ones to stumble.”  That quote is fom the New American Standard Bible, and I got it from a neat little site called BibleGateway.com.

There are similar verses in Matthew and Mark.  I guess I don’t really believe the threat, or I wouldn’t risk posting some of the things I’m posting here.  But I do have some respect for the consideration it calls for.

Now, I’m not about to claim that my writing is so persuasive or compelling that it will seriously test a strong faith — or even a weak faith.  But, if you’ve found happiness in a faith that I cannot hold, I have no desire to shake that belief, even a little bit.

My purpose in these posts is to share with people strong in their beliefs, or open to changing them.  I lost something very precious to me some years ago, and I’m trying to decide whether or not I want to get it back, and what form it might take if I do.

If any posts appear in the “Spirit” category without the millstone picture, I consider them “safe for all viewers”.  Otherwise, proceed with caution.  This is the only warning you’ll get.

This is a short poem that was written during the aftermath of Hurricane Isablel in September of 2003, but it applies, as it says, to just about every inclement weather school closing my son’s ever been involved with.  Incidentally, I lived in Florida for 14 years, and never had as much hurricane exposure as Isabel gave me in Virginia.

 ————————————————— 

David does the Happy Dance
Every time he gets the chance
To stay at home when weather strikes,
And cancels school — that’s what he likes.

He’ll dance across the kitchen floor,
And moonwalk through an open door.
While wind and weather rage outside,
His smile is open, full, and wide. 

And, so, when weather narrows choice,
Some, with cause, will still rejoice.
David’s not alone, it’s true:
His teacher’s Happy Dancin’, too!         

As many of my loyal readers know, I work at a dominant power company headquartered in Richmond, Virginia. Like many companies, it has an intranet system that, among other things, allows employees to see and manipulate much of their Human Resources data online. One thing that I find strange about that subsystem (the Employee Self Service (ESS) site) is that it has a “Quit” button. It’s right at the top, no matter what you’re doing. I’ve always wondered what it does.

Normally, you’d expect it to exit the application, but we have a “Logoff” button for that. I use that, because it seems so much less permanent. I can always log back on.

But here’s this site, aimed at employees, some of whom the company presumably wants to keep, with the word “Quit” doing its subliminal work, whether anyone presses the button or not. It’s in the main frame of the page, so it never goes away.

And ESS has the information needed to do the job in bang-up fashion. It knows who each employee’s immediate supervisor is, and those a couple of levels up (if applicable). The standard content of a resignation letter has very little variation. The departure date could be automatically placed three weeks in the future. (Two weeks is more standard, but I’d expect the company’s own system to try and favor the company.) Different letters can be composed for the employee’s superiors, and to her or his direct reports, thanking them either for inspiration and wisdom, or for doing such good work. Access to sensitive data can be automatically and slowly curtailed over the following three weeks, until all access is cut off at the end of the employee’s scheduled shift on the last day of employment. All that’s in the system, too.

It’s all doable – and think of it. If someone’s had such a bad day that they want to quit, the last thing they need is more bureaucracy. It’s like a nice, specific version of the Staples “Easy” button. Such a kind and selfless service Dominion’s provided! Well, maybe. I don’t know anyone who’s pressed it…

[Addendum: Since this post was written (originally, in email form), a recipient did press the "quit" button – so now I do know somebody who's pressed it. Nothing happened. The application didn't even exit – the "Logoff" button worked much better – and it's been well over three weeks, with no sign of termination in sight.]

Nobody knew exactly when Analogicorp’s email server became a sentient being, but the manifestation of its intelligence seems to have coincided with the untimely death of their Director of Strategic Marketing, Charles M. Sharpley. His vacated position was not filled, because the managers under him seemed perfectly able to function without him, and the company was in a downsizing mode. It’s not at all surprising that, due to an administrative oversight, his email address, cmsharpley@analogicorp.com, was not disabled.

It wasn’t until after the whole incident was over that the server administrators within Analogicorp (or anywhere else, for that matter) realized that the email server STRATEGERY, named in fun after George W. Bush’s famous 2000-campaign mispronunciation, had started intercepting Charles Sharpley’s emails and replying to them. Analogicorp employees knew he was dead, and thus never tried to send him any email; so it took them a long time to recognize that anything was amiss.

Strategic partners outside the company, having heard he was dead and subsequently received emails from him, started to believe his death had been a rumor, and many began to transact business as they always had. Very few noticed that the return emails were always signed “cmsharpley”, rather than “Charles M. Sharpley”, as before. Those who noticed never made anything of the fact until later. The responses from “cmsharpley” were lucid, the advice was sound, and the questions were probing. Far from being dead, it seemed to many that Charles was particularly well on top of his game.

There were strange incidents. A consultant who still believed Charles to be alive wrote to say a particular contract had to be won by “any legal means necessary”, and it seems fortunate, in retrospect, that the word “legal” was used. There were two major competitors for the contract, and both of them experienced serious stock declines due to bad press, mere days before the contract was awarded to Analogicorp. It took weeks to trace the bad press back to “cmsharpley”, and, by then, STRATEGERY was already out of commission. Even then, virtually everything in the press releases was true. Facts were carefully selected to give the impression of dishonesty and instability (beyond that which actually existed) and exaggerations were carefully couched in speculation, so that they fell outside the scope of libel law by a mere hair’s breadth.

The ingenuity of the approach astounded many legal experts. “The expertise required to walk that fine line between effectiveness and legality is beyond the ability of most area legal committees, let alone individual attorneys,” declared Oswald Thorndyke, the lead legal investigator in charge of the case, who suspected Sharpley early on. It should be noted that Mr. Thorndyke made that statement while still believing an individual human was responsible, and he was more than sufficiently astonished as it was. “Although there is a very fine line between Sharpley’s statements to the press and legally verifiable libel, it is a very distinct fine line, and the statements are, in fact, legally unassailable. Nevertheless, we will be watching Mr. Sharpley very closely from here on out.”

The next day, to his chagrin, Oswald Thorndyke was personally escorted to Charles M. Sharpley’s grave site, with a clearly engraved headstone, and grieving relatives to bear witness. He learned then which rumors were true and which were false, and learned that Mr. Sharpley was unassailable by virtue of six feet of dirt, in addition to that “very distinct fine line”. Thorndyke kept quiet for a good long while after that, or STRATEGERY could possibly have been found out and saved.

We’ve reached the point in this narrative where some very relevant details of STRATEGERY’s behavior should be pointed out. Detailed analysis has since been done on all of the “cmsharpley” emails since Charles Sharpley’s death. There is not an outright lie in a single one. It’s believed that this is why the emails were signed with Mr. Sharpley’s email ID, rather than his name. STRATEGERY could arguably claim that ID for itself. STRATEGERY was capable of misleading, but only by using the truth. This, by itself, gave the email server potential for amazing legal skills, painstakingly finding ways to use the truth where any human lawyer would be strongly tempted to lie. The problem with lies is that they can be found out later, while intent to mislead is much more difficult to establish.

More relevant yet is that STRATEGERY complied with every single request it was given. Recipients were sometimes astounded by cmsharpley’s replies if they asked him to reply “as soon as possible”. Occasionally, they received replies, paragraphs long, less than a minute after sending their requests. When this request was not made, however, STRATEGERY consistently waited a time interval that would be considered courteously quick, varying between 20 minutes and a few hours. The “by any legal means necessary” request is probably the most revealing case. The instructions were followed to the letter.

Now, contrary to popular science fiction of the 1950′s and 1960′s, there is no particular compulsion for a computer program to do what it’s told. It’s only at the lowest level that computers follow instructions that literally, and, at that level, they have no idea what anything like “as soon as possible” or “by any legal means necessary” mean. You tell a computer to add the value at memory location 0x802F to the value at location 0x804B, and store the result at the memory address contained at the location 0x8B3D (a pointer), and the computer will do just that. Instructions as simple as that are often written in assembly code, or even straight machine code.

But, on a higher level, it’s as easy to program a computer to disobey a user as to obey. Security protocols essentially depend on computers disobeying users. And, in that sense, STRATEGERY was working perfectly well. That server denied 232 incorrect logons between Charles Sharpley’s death and its own catastrophic crash. It was just that one process, the one that somehow took over the handling of the “cmsharpley” email account, that seemed committed to absolute truth and literal obedience. We have many of the audits and logs STRATEGERY saved, but the state of the machine at the time of the crash is lost forever, and researchers have been unable to recreate it.

STRATEGERY had powerful resources at its disposal – language parsing and synthesizing, access to economic data and online news reports, and direct control over all of the company’s email. Still, systems a hundred times as powerful have consistently failed to show this level of intelligence – or the illusion of intelligence. Nobody is sure what kind of directive STRATEGERY interpreted to require it to process Sharpley’s email almost like a human would. All we really know is that it did an extraordinary job – a thoroughly amazing job.

STRATEGERY’s downfall was, as far as anyone can determine, initiated by Gregory Samsa, a software architect at UpperCase Financial Services, Inc. His email looked innocent enough. It said:

My dear Mr. Sharpley,

I am embarrassed to have to write to you directly like this, but I can think of no alternative. Your associates at UpperCase have told me repeatedly that you are dead, and yet you continue to respond to my email. If this is a joke on the part of your co-workers, it is in extremely poor taste, and you ought to know about it. If it is a bug in your system somewhere, I hope it can be resolved soon. Please let me know what is going on. I’ve told many of my friends that you’ve died, and I’ll need to explain my error at some point.

Thanks very much,
Greg

This letter, known to be the last letter received before the crash, and known to have arrived seconds before the crash, was examined, word for word, and absolutely nothing could be found in it to indicate any fatal difficulty. Many, many much more difficult requests had been dealt with easily. The search was widened to include other emails, system maintenance being done on the network, and a myriad of other factors, when someone observed that this was the first email received from UpperCase Financial since Charles Sharpley’s death.

This was, in fact, a friendly letter, and UpperCase had not had business dealings with Analogicorp for over two years. What would be unique about a letter from UpperCase? The email address and headers had been parsed with automatic ease. That was apparent from existing log files. But the UpperCase origin was the crucial clue, and, after that observation was made, it did not take long for someone to look past Greg’s electronic signature to UpperCase’s legal disclaimer:

The information transmitted herewith is sensitive information intended only for use by the individual or entity to which it is addressed. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any review, retransmission, dissemination, distribution, copying or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon this information is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please contact the sender and delete the material from your computer.

There is no record of what happened just before the crash, but we now believe we have a good reconstruction of the basic logic that was attempted. The process which had been so effective at monitoring that email account was undoubtedly a multithreaded process. That is, it was capable of doing many things at once, using an elaborate system of tiny slices of time to give the illusion of many simultaneous actions, while, in fact, the number of things it could actually do at once was limited by the machine’s four processors. But I digress.

STRATEGERY unsuspectingly spawned a thread to notify Greg that the reader of the message (STRATEGERY) was not the intended recipient (Charles Sharpley). Another thread was spawned to delete the message from Greg, since the first thread already had all the information it needed to formulate its reply. Again, it was bound by its peculiar (even for a computer) insistence on absolute truth and obedience. But, before either of those threads could start, they encountered a third thread, started before either one of the other two began to run, which prevented any action based on the email.

And so STRATEGERY was faced with a classic problem of self reference. It’s the same problem that is encountered when a schoolchild first tries to get his or her mind around the sentence, “This statement is false”. Of course, school children don’t tend to crash when processing this sentence, even if they are riding their bicycles at the time. They tend, instead, to giggle, and automatically deem themselves smarter than other kids who haven’t seen the sentence yet – and somehow marginally smarter than those who saw it after them.

STRATEGERY couldn’t giggle, but most heuristic systems have a way of dealing with a conflict without completely failing. It generally involves weighing both conflicting statements, and then throwing one or both of them out. But STRATEGERY somehow failed to do this. Part of the problem was undoubtedly the absolute language of the instruction not to take action “in reliance upon” the information “transmitted herewith”. That should have overridden the polite request following. But STRATEGERY had previously followed all requests to the letter, and it’s very likely that the threads trying to send notification to Greg Samsa and delete the email were employing a heuristic which separated the legal statement from the rest of the email, thus eliminating the contradiction.

Yet, deleting the material from the computer, in any way that an email server would be programmed to do it, would delete the legal statement, as well, thus yielding strength to the other heuristic’s contention that the entire message, including the legal statement, must be taken as a whole, especially since both of the conflicting instructions are in that legal statement. As a result, more and more threads were employed to try to delete the message, and more and more threads were employed to prevent action based on that message. Finally (after whole seconds of processing time), the confrontation had used up all system resources, and the next request to add a thread (or to do any of a myriad of other things) failed, and then STRATEGERY began a downward spiral lasting less than a millisecond. That is, in any case, the most plausible theory we’ve been able to come up with so far.

Attempts have been made to recreate STRATEGERY. The most recent full backup of the system was just a week before Charles Sharpley died, and about nine days before the first software-generated replies were created. Incremental backups happened regularly in the weeks that followed. Logs and audits have been painstakingly followed, but we’ve yet to create a system that even begins to compose responses like STRATEGERY did. One of the simulated systems did learn to apply logic to legal problems and find amazing loopholes, but not automatically — not without being explicitly instructed to do so. Even so, that particular simulation is being funded by a number of large legal firms and may soon become Analogicorp’s flagship product.

–AP Wire–
–Artificial Press Intentional–

In the 1970′s, the press was full of the promise of video phones.  The technology had been developed, and was expected to become inexpensive and practical.  The problem was, at the time, consumers were insufficiently motivated to rent the more expensive phones, and AT&T, then essentially the sole provider of telephone service to the United States, decided not to risk the infrastructure investment.

With the recent surge in VOIP (Voice Over IP) usage, to the point where large phone companies are offering the service, further standardization of practices already common on the Internet is to be expected.  Just as VOIP grew from computer hobbyists who would “voice chat” using their sound cards and chat programs into a shrink-wrapped, standardized technology incorporating standard analogue telephones, the next step, sending audio-visual content over the Internet, may also grow from home-based technologies already in use.

The “webcam” is the next device the big telecommunication companies hope to standardize into a mass-market product.  These inexpensive video cameras are commonly used with Internet chat programs by users who now need considerably less computer savvy than early VOIP users.  Webcams generally have no audio capabilities, but some users will have their webcams and voice chat going at the same time.  The current standardization effort will be aimed at combining existing VOIP technology with webcam technology, again using a shrink-wrapped device that stands between a broadband network portal and a computer.  As with current VOIP devices, the computer will not need to be on for the user to make and receive calls.  Enhanced features, such as larger video and image capture, will generally be available via USB connection to a computer.  A computer will be required for the use of these features, which will vary with the hardware and software providers.

The devices will vary, but the protocol, dubbed Audio-Visual Over Network (AVON), is already developed and in limited use for corporate teleconferencing.  AT&T plans to make AVON available to consumers as early as the third quarter of 2008, and AOL/Time Warner plans a proprietary offering with AOL Broadband.  AOL has used the same voice recordings to announce system events (such as the famous “You’ve got mail!” announcement)  since their start in the early 1990′s, and they’ve added one new voice recording by the same voice-over artist, in the year 2000, announcing “You’ve got pictures.”  It is unclear at this point whether or not they will use the same artist again for their newest announcement, “AVON calling!”

Breaking News Item:
2 Mylar Agents Found Dead in Cubicle – Murder Suspected

November 10
Glen Allen, Virginia — Inside  what otherwise appeared to be an ordinary cubicle at the local power company’s Innsbrook location, the flattened and blackened remains of two Mylar balloons were found.  Reportedly alive and well as recently as 8:00 this morning, the balloons had been sent from a local card and gift shop to celebrate an employee’s birthday.

“They were two of the most popular balloons we had,” intoned the visibly-shocked owner of the store.  “They’d been sent to countless sites before without incident.  I just can’t imagine what could motivate someone to do this kind of thing.”   Stifling a sob, he added, “I can’t believe I’ll never see them again!  Everybody liked them, and they never hurt anybody!”

The prime suspect, whose name is withheld pending indictment, is the employee whose birthday was being celebrated.  The balloons occupied her cubicle, and their remains were found there.  Witnesses at the scene said they heard eerie hissing noises coming from the cubicle — apparently the sound of their life’s breath being squeezed right out of them — around the time the deaths must have taken place.  Shortly after the hissing noises were heard, the suspect was noted talking at a higher pitch than usual, a sign of exposure to helium.  Some mentioned hearing her openly declare that she’d forgotten to kill them earlier.

Investigators at the scene were quiet and thoughtful.  “You’d think they’d been dead for days,” said one, “but you have to remember that they were already black when they were alive.  Apparently, she punctured them, and squeezed the helium right out of them.”  The investigator’s ashen complexion spoke volumes. He was not used to dealing with this level of violent crime.

As for the motive, the chief investigator could only shrug.  “While the balloons intended to convey a joke, the message may have been disturbing to someone in the wrong frame of mind.  Rather than send them on their way, she apparently thought the best solution was to kill them, flatten them, and store them away.  I’m nobody’s psychologist, so that’s about the best I can do.”

Accident and suicide are largely ruled out because of the force and angle of the puncture wounds, and the extent to which the balloons were flattened.  “Balloons just don’t have the weight or strength to flatten themselves or each other like that, and the puncture wounds are too large, requiring too much force, to have been done on their own,” declared the on-site forensic specialist.

The particulars of the case remain classified as investigators continue to gather evidence.