Sci Fi Sketch

Yes, by the year 2015 it had already begun to happen.  Those who personally remembered the events and aftermath of World War Two, a thing that did not happen out of any old reason in the Universe as far its construction might go, were getting up there.  Everyone from the Great War had finally passed on.  The adults who could tell a real story pertaining to either were getting very very thin.  One might remember her father, who may well have driven a tank, not able to drive, spooked a bit, going back somewhere she had no idea of, but the fathers themselves were dying.  The black hole of the wars had come and spread, and now indeed, the last were being sucked away into the gravity of disappearance we all must face.

It was by that year, through the advent of something called the computer, which had greatly profited a few certain kind of individuals, and everyone else joining in to make a buck, that a vast quantity of meta information had been gathered in all sorts of electronic banks, in the form of ones and zeros.  The vast interconnected machines had come to know, in the blink of an eye, our tastes, our preferences.  In fact, it constantly asked for them, and the human being was happy to respond and provide and participate.  How could it not participate?  And so, from one thing, led another, and then another, and then that great thing, shopping, the great therapy of the creature human, on the run, excited, seeking a cave, a soothing crop or whatever, added more superficial information about itself unto the great machine of ones and zeros.  What kind of porn a person watches, what shopping sites they might go to, Prada, Louis Vuitton, Banana Republic, Times Sophisticated Shopper, what things an individual might search for as far as anything goes, food, recipes, exercise, music, travel.  It was all in there, how could it not be.  How long did you talk to your mother?  What text did you send?  Who do you talk to?  Everything under an eye, a peculiar one.

It was by the year 2015 that the computer experts themselves began to notice something funny.  The ones and zeros had flown around.  Consultants used them.  Political campaigns could not proceed without them, no one would open a bar, no one could go on a date without the blessing of the gathered mega data, and there were only a very few sort of independent samurai or old school bard types who still tried to even escape from it all, increasingly distressed as they must have found themselves, running out of room just about everywhere.  The corporate Nazi takeover that had come dressed as a lamb providing information...  and even those who should have known better, lots of them, who'd been discriminated against ancestrally were so enjoying their new influence and prestige, that they too got carried away, always ready to pull out the "gotcha" thing, in the same old language by which they had been oppressed.  "You're not going to serve me?" an elder self entitled quite successful lawyer would say to a barman who'd dealt with him for 20 years, and was just busy getting other people, a couple, regulars, who'd just gotten engaged, waiting to reveal it, a good seat...

And then, something funny began to happen.  In the cyber world.  Code, ones and zeros, the way computers store things, repeat back what we might write or record on their tablet blackboard...

The computers began to do something peculiar, after all this amassed data that spread over every aspect of life, a great all reaching census.  And no longer was it linear, if that makes any sense, no longer ones and zeroes, but shapes, geometric began to appear.  Conical shapes, shapes of geometric form, as if the great banks had begun to dream, were waking.  And what did it mean, that the computers themselves, without any urging, were beginning to do something uninitiated by their human masters, as far as anyone could tell.  One computer in Pasadena maybe produced a cube out of all the bits of stuff, and it showed the cube to another one in San Jose.   And the San Jose one, which had swallowed every note and every factoid from Lou Gehrig's averages to Jodi Arias trial bites, took that cube, ran its mind over it, and then sent it on, and soon, the computer was doing its own math models, as in fact some young bright people at CalTech had had the inspiration to bestow it with tentatively.

HAL.  No one could understand now why the computer was now organizing its brain and its own language so.  The shapes would show up, like child's building blocks, assembling, toyed with, built up, wiped away by its own mind. But, it seemed indeed as if there was some talk beginning to happen, and the makers of the machine had no explanation for it.  The machines had begun to think, symbolically, on their own.

It was the conical shapes, and their frequency, which was the most readily mystifying.  They seemed to be very privately traded, or shared, as if one had to look upside down and backwards at a picture in order to see.   And by that time, maybe the background of the ones and zeros was getting clearer, at least to the people who tried their best to remain, at least spiritually, outside the habit.  The ones and zeros was like a wall paper, and now the machines were talking, and going, in a way, a bit wild, sending elongated bent cones of formulae so precise that the highest human math could but conjecture, albeit with a self-confidence since it was technically possible to be able to, say, write out an equation that would express the same form, though really that was a futile measure.  "Whale penises," one expert observed on the complex shapes of this new self-initiated conversation. The machine had begun to create puppets of its own, and the brightest computer minds, who'd made a lot of money creating the brain channels and neurosynapses of the electric petrie dishes, could only stand back, stunned, much as they tried to pretend, publicly, that they themselves were on their own responsible for the new things that were going on.