Singular Muck

Singular Muck

Copyright October 2023 by By Fit529 Dotcom

== Disclaimers ==

All persons are over age 18 (after initial personal-history nonsexy backstory).

All names are randomized. In an infinite multiverse, Every Name is Your Name.

Political Warning: This describes a dystopia. Every dystopia has politics, just ask _____, the state/country with the most/least corruption/dysfunction.

Please don't point out that the dystopia is dystopian.

If you hate utopian/dystopian works, feel free to either light a candle or curse the darkness, comment, and/or check out my other works.

== Chapter: Origins ==

So, I didn't start out wanting to be a god.

Sure, it's fun to imagine, but there's a lot of responsibility?

Besides, whoever heard of a god named Kevin Cooper. Aren't we supposed to only have ONE name, like the Greek or Roman ones?

Presuming that gods (NOT with capital g's) need a moral compass, I had that: My father was a lawyer at the US Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, and my mother was the Fullbright professor of Moral Philosophy at Georgetown Law. I was an only child, and they didn't make my life simple.

At least, talking with friends, they seemed to have watched a lot more TV than I did, as a kid.

School was boring from the start, so they got me this program where I went to the nearby school for gym and art and piano lessons and oboe, but only in the morning. Then after lunch, I walked across the street to this Montessori place and stayed there into the evening 'cuz my parents worked late.

Now, before you get ideas, I was not a perfect kid. Ever hear of preacher's kids?

Exactly!

My troublemaking ended when I went off to a private boarding school in Maine starting my 5th grade year. It was super-small and all boys, but there was a sister school that was all girls and we did a bunch of activities together, so I wasn't entirely deprived of social interaction.

Our schools were full-time-plus, full-year-round; we didn't have vacations like other schools.

Some students had rich and/or famous parents, which meant crap schedules, only getting a few days-long visits a year. My mom and dad would fly in for a day or two, take me out driving (or golfing, later), chat with my teachers, and then head home.

I did have some normal high school experiences. I was in orchestra (piano & harpsichord, and oboe when there wasn't a piano part) and chorus (deep bass), and then track / cross-country / tennis / golf / archery / trap. We had lots of stuff available, but limited time to do it.

Classes were Montessori-style projects, with 'certs' for topics achieved, and topics were whatever struck my fancy. I had lots of 'hey-that's-cool' ideas so it was hard to pick sometimes, even among the boring required-list topics.

Starting my Freshman year they let us take AP tests (in whatever we wanted) so my friends and I decided to have a contest and add our points. My friend Juan, a polymath eidetic guy, beat me and 3 of my friends by 1 point; the rest had lower scores and had to pay up in Scuba points (a fun but limited activity for Maine, summer only).

After my junior year, my counselor said they were holding me back by keeping me there, that I should pick a college and start, and I got their point.

On the plus side, I would get to be around more girls, and the girl I'd dated for over a year didn't want to go very far, physically or really emotionally, so (with very, very limited choices) I was boxed out.

Since my mom was at Georgetown Law, I got into Georgetown for undergrad. Trouble was, I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life.

I'll spare you the details. Suffice to say I was a dork and a book nerd and a quick participant in stupid ideas that backfired, but not in any expensive or illegal way, just tragic ones for my social life. I really REALLY liked to get stuck up assholes in trouble, and I was good at it. The trouble was that they frequently knew it was me.

Now, one thing about Georgetown was, once you're full time, you can take as many classes as you want at the same time. I'd always taken 9 subjects in school before, so I kept that up for college, and zipped through them.

At first it was pretty easy - I'd had a lot of the material already, just happenstantially, so the courses touched on stuff I already knew.

Eventually I settled on a triple major - philosophy, comp-sci, and applied physics, which I'd started doing just for fun.

I should mention that in my 3 years at Georgetown, I didn't actually finish my bachelor's. I didn't apply for the degree at the Bursar's office. Being a prof's kid reduced the undergrad tuition, but not for grad-school, a hassle. Plus, I had some scholarships / grant money but that likewise was limited to undergrad.

So, easy-peasy, I just kept taking graduate-level courses (as an undergrad) and no one seemed to care or charge me too much.

My master-plan (to make a pun) was to graduate, get 3 undergrad degrees, take one semester for my master's, and maybe decide about a Ph.D. later.

The plan failed. It didn't work. I was sick of schooling. I wanted to DO something.

Then, along came the Forbin Project.

Of course, it was named after the science fiction movie, and was the same sort of thing - an attempt to build a real-world general artificial intelligence bot that could be trained to do simplistic tasks but also evaluate the situations it was in.

A professor messaged me and suggested I apply; since he was cool, I said sure, and Boom, they hired me! I was psyched, game for something new.

Some of it was secret, so I had to fill out all sorts of government paperwork, but best of all, I got MONEY for doing stuff instead of having no money all the time as a poor college student with no car and no life.

The pay was good enough to rectify my car-lessness into shitbox status (a rusted-out super-old Prius), and (once paperwork was finalized), get moved to rural West Virginia.

Why there?

Who the eff knows! Government contracting (per the grapevine) usually means spreading contracts / employees to various congressional districts, so my jaded view is, someone's vote was needed.

My office was technically a 2-story professional building above a dentist's office. I didn't REALLY work there - we all worked from home, but we could go into the office for meetings or whatever if we wanted to. Trouble was, we weren't supposed to talk to each other, ever.

The no-talking thing is called a 'Chinese Wall', a term from the financial industry where two people at the same company could work either for or against each other and not know it.

My home-office was thus my 3-bedroom apartment, mediocre anywhere else but super high-end for Edville, West Virginia (pop. 6k). The 3 bedrooms were handy for storage (school stuff still packed in boxes), an office-space desk setup, and an actual bedroom.

I thought about, but rejected, putting my desk in the big bedroom since I didn't use my bedroom for entertaining. Ever. Ug.

There was about zero opportunity to date anyone in town.

I went from target-rich Georgetown undergrad (pretty and smart women everywhere) to Zero. Not that I had lots of girlfriends at GT - I was kind of shy anyway. I'd dated some, enough to get sometimes lucky, but nothing really stuck and I was free to move but unlucky to not bring anyone with me.

So starting as a 20 year old almost-degreed but over-educated guy with no social life, I had limited things to do. Not wanting to be bored, I just worked on work - writing software.

The goal was to translate fact patterns into simplified models using natural-language processing. This would parse real-world data to create dependency graphs, goal-seeking towards optimal endpoints. Each actor in the situation had their own goals, and these had to be graded by ethical choices. Ethics were additional models, frequently in competition with each other, each generating confidence scores and an ethical-rightness score.

You can be really confident that something is right/wrong, but have no idea if your rule is applicable to the situation. Or, sort-of confident on right/wrong but definite your rules apply to the situation.

These scores get assigned for whether the program outputs should help or hinder every person in a situation, as well as the primary goals.

Odd stuff.

If this sounds hard, it was!

There were parts that were an absolute blast, but I spent a lot of time frustrated and trying random shit until something kind of clicked in me and I could generalize an approach to a set of situations.

So, the job was good and bad.

Off work time wasn't that interesting. I tried asking around if anyone knew who the 'Ed' in Edville was. Some people thought it was related to the river having eddies. Others thought it was some wagon-wheel factory owner, but Edston (nearby) was named after him so no one knew.

Edville had more bars than any sane person would expect, but I figured out there were people living just out of town in the hills and they came in to drink. This was obvious by the rusted-out pickups covered in thick-caked mud parked near these bars.

I was pretty good at deduction (and I'm laughing as I write this), and stupid for thinking this observation was insightful. The area around Edville was boring, too, so of course there were bars.

My downstairs neighbors were genuine, bona-fide West Virginia overall-wearing partially-toothed meth-heads, a husband and wife (married? dealers?) who yelled at each other and sometimes made amusing amounts of noise in their bedroom.

I didn't care. Mostly they were quiet when I was trying to sleep, and back in college I'd had a girlfriend who snored - so I knew to use the best option for earplugs, Macks' brand silicone ones.

Meanwhile, work kept going and I made steady progress, getting programming tasks from a program called Jira, putting code into a tool called Git (not related to either people missing a leg or British idiots), and validating what I'd done with sample scenarios in a specialized tool called, "DOGGE" with all the obvious puns made for its components doing dog-like things.

Programmers are sometimes fun and sometimes full of 'dad-joke' humor.

== Chapter: Scanning Side-Gig ==

About two years into this project, my manager, let's call him Phil, emailed me and said they were offering development staff the chance to earn $40,000 for two weeks' work getting scanned by a giant new scanner an adjacent project had developed.

I said, Sign Me Up. My salary wasn't bad, but I wanted a new car, and what the heck, it might be more fun than the coding tasks I was getting stuck with, which were increasingly obviously edge-cases.

Plus, for the 2 weeks I was on paid leave, so I was getting paid twice! Yippee!

The scanner was back in the DC suburbs, so I had to drive out, sleep in a room in the hospital so they could control what I ate and ensure I didn't do drugs, and it'd last 14 days straight.

Being away from my apartment for 2 weeks meant stopping the mail, but otherwise no one would have noticed. I did put all my valuables under the refrigerator before I left, though, just in case the meth-heads wanted to toss the place.

Turns out, the task was for me to get a hugely extensive medical checkup for 2 days (including toenail clippings and a sperm sample!?!) and then lay in a giant banging cylinder for 14 hours straight. Most of the time I'd be staring at a magnifying mirror to look at a distant big-screen computer monitor.

Funky.

While they imaged me, I had to do all kinds of stuff, naming objects in the languages I mostly knew - English, French, German, and Latin (Fun! What's latin for Fax machine? Exactly!!). Then, I did the same with pictures of obvious verbs and adjectives and adverbs.

Once that was done, they started asking me general questions, like, describe some friends, how they look, what they act like in different situations, stuff like that.

As I talked, a transcription converted my spoken words into written ones on the screen, though I had to turn that off so I didn't slow down too much. It's disconcerting to dictate and think at the same time.

At the end of the first week, they told me that no human would be listening to anything I said anymore, that it all had to be double-blind for their researchers, plus they wanted me to be absolutely truthful in a way that I couldn't be if I knew someone would listen and judge my actions.

Wow, was that freeing!

The questions the next week got a lot more personal, and posed moral questions about what I actually would do, versus what I thought I was supposed to do. Usually those were the same, but it let me be forthright and imagine myself in the situations it presented.

I genuinely didn't want to hurt anyone, so even when the scenario was, you can hurt this person you hate without anyone finding out, I honestly could say, no, I wouldn't, I would know that I'd done it, and I didn't want to be that kind of person.

Coming home and going back to work was kind of a downer. It had been a lot of fun.

Three weeks after I came back, they wanted to do it again, and I said, "Hells yeah" (in nice business-email-speak) and I was off for another shot.

This time it was much more elaborate for all the nouns I knew, I had to name everything, and I honestly didn't know the german words for a lot of stuff since I hadn't studied it that long. But, it included pictures of famous people like Nixon and Bruce Springsteen, and I was supposed to describe what I knew about them, including emotional contexts.

Somehow, they got a hold of a set of pictures from my friends' social media that included people I knew well, so, without anyone listening, I could say what I thought, including that a good friend's girlfriend was bossy and argumentative and wrong for him.

I was over 22 by then, fully adult, so the porn shouldn't have been surprising, but in context? WOW.

You don't expect, for sure, to spend an hour trying to think in German and naming political figures you barely recognize, and then stare at famous people naked, or individual body parts in arrays of sizes and shapes.

The instructions on screen said, rate the men and women both, and what I noticed about them, found attractive or distasteful, etc.. It felt a little wrong (this was technically my job, to answer the questions), but since they told me no human would get access to my answers in any form, I just went freewheeling and tried to be as honest as possible.

No girlfriend and no sex life made me a horn-dog and I admit some of that bled into my philosophical discussions, but, hey, whatever. It's not like I could give wrong answers.

I even had to describe my family history. My answers included being sad that I was the only son of an only son, of an only son. At the same time, I knew my family tree (junior high project) and some of them had 12 kids. I envied the excitement of that, and having extended connections and support from people, stuff like that.

Being alone in my life, I was young so I didn't feel like I was missing having a family, but still I knew that some of the ROTC guys - military-destined students - had married and started families already even though they were still in their undergrad years. It seemed odd to me but I liked the idea that they had a sense of confidence and security that my friend group lacked.

Analyzing someone else's life choices got me going and they had a lot of leading questions about that subject area, days worth but spread out between other questions.

The questions were like that - some were leading, inviting long-winded answers wherever my brain took me, and other ones (with an icon) showed I should answer with short, terse responses.

I had to admire the team that came up with the questions - and I could definitely tell when some questions were written by foreigners because they presumed all kinds of odd situations, like, if I had four houses and four jobs and four families and I had to keep them secret from each other, how would I do that?

The simple answer of, "Don't do that" obviously didn't fit the question, so I tried to envision how I'd approach it, but from an ethical perspective, so I didn't get into hating myself for living four simultaneous lies. My answer was, tell them I had a big secret that meant I could only be with them one week a month, that it wasn't my decision, but that I loved them anyway. So, they didn't know the specifics, but then I wouldn't have to lie as much.

Fun stuff!

Happily, when I got home, I found I had both payments, so $80k in my bank account, and quickly put in an order for a new Tesla Cybertruck, though I'd have to wait to get it - always the case, unfortunately. Still I was excited.

Two more months went by at work and I chugged away at writing software to handle even more edge cases. That led to tackling some of the impossible cases (no right answers) by breaking them into knowable and unknowable sections, which had its own tricks I could work on. This kept me totally occupied and I worked more than full time, since working was far more fun than playing some shoot-m-up game.

After those months, they wanted me back for scanning.

Who was I to say no to that!

Five more sessions of 2 weeks scanning, 2 weeks off, repeated, punctuated by some days back in WV doing work or relaxing, whatever I wanted. They cut the pay to $20k each for the next sections but my boss sent me an email saying I could take the interim weeks as 'paid leave' (vacation) also.

I got bored, so I went to visit my parents for a week, I'd not seen them in a while and I liked catching up for a while (at least until my mother got annoying with the 'get on with your life' comments).

Near the end, the scanning questions seemed to be based on my previous answers, but it wasn't provable, just a hunch I had.

They made me listen to a "France24" news-channel in French and do a simultaneous translation, which was SUPER hard until I started getting better at it and I figured out it was a skill where I couldn't pay attention to what I was saying, I only could listen to the audio and let my mouth go on autopilot.

Then, no more tests, and I was back at work.

Another 6 months passed, during which time I took ownership of my brand spankin'-new blue-wrapped big-tired Cybertruck. The apartment complex didn't have a place to plug the CT in, though, unless I wanted to unroll a huge extension cord across the lawn.

My only solution was to park it most of the time across our small town behind the police station - about the only place with an EV charging point (and where I figured it would be safe).

My work life chugged on another few months until the world went to hell.

== Chapter: World Goes to Hell ==

Not actual hell, just... one version of hell.

The first thing that made news was a website named PINETREE where people could anonymously report crimes and criminals. That would be unremarkable, but then it allowed people to vote on each crime (anonymized data) being marginally-okay to very bad, and who deserved punishment.

Obviously, lots of libelous content was created where data wasn't anonymized enough, but the website was hosted somewhere odd and authorities couldn't take it down.

Another reaction-section (to someone else's crime) asked for creative punishments that taught the person better but weren't just punitive. These could be really creative, and people upvoted or downvoted those, too.

The site got to be very popular. I even looked at it and thought of my recently-quieter meth-neighbors. It had a way to search by crime type, so I read through some of the horrible things people did to each other when they were on meth.

Turns out, those pages had a pop-up box where you could report a person for 'having symptoms of substance abuse'. I approved of that idea, since I'd seen a few people in the dorms who drank a lot and really never stopped. Plus, being an alcoholic isn't a crime until you drive drunk, anymore than being a meth-head is a minor crime for each possession charge until you're stealing cars and catalytic converters to fund your addiction.