Hezekiah watched as Peter jumped forward and gave Dr Ariana Barns a hug. “What’s this I hear about you changing your personality.”
Ariana stood there frozen. Unmoving. Then almost like she realised she had to play a role she hugged Peter back. “Has Unity been telling you fairy tales?”
Peter let go of her. “You do seem a bit tense Ari.”
“Do I?” Ariana replied. “There is a reason for that. And it has led to some very big discoveries that I’ll show you in the lab.”
The four of them began the long walk down the corridor. The corridor was wide, yet for some reason Hezekiah couldn’t see to the end of it – even though it wasn’t that far away. He knew that when some server locations were processing too much information, rather than slow down. They would not render parts of the environment that was far away. He wondered if that was what was happening right now.
Ariana walked in front of them all, not turning her head towards them but talking loudly so all of them could hear. “I know Unity likes to use the analogy of someone with split brain personality.” Rather than turn her head, Ariana pointed behind her back towards Unity. “But that analogy completely fails to grasp what this really is. A better analogy would be that of the cerebral cortex verses the basal ganglia.”
“Are you saying you’ve developed another neocortex?” Peter suggested as a guess.
“Even better,” Ariana replied. “The basal ganglia was one of the first parts of the brain to develop. It’s where we got the fight or flight instinct from. Because in the early world where the basal ganglia evolved, life involved a lot of running away or you might be eaten. That’s why some people call it our reptile brain. But as our environment changed the basal ganglia, became ineffective for what we needed. And that’s when we developed the amygdala. That was particularly important for storing and creating new memories.” She turned around a corner in a fluid motion and didn’t lose a single beat in her sentence. “But once our distant ancestors started to live in large groups and social interactions became more important our reptile brain was woefully underequipped for what we needed. And that’s when the neocortex really started to develop. And humans have been using that for the past one-hundred thousand years.” She pointed at the celling. “Even in here, all we’re doing is digitally simulating a meat-brain on a matrix – without changing it in any way. Since humanity made a concerted effort not to develop AI more powerful than us, our current brain design has been woefully unequipped for all the challenges we’re facing here.”
Peter replied. “Are you talking about multi-dimensional space?”
Hezekiah was still trying to unpack everything being said right now. He still wasn’t fully following the conversation. Yet, he was impressed that Peter was not only understanding everything so quickly, but also unpacking what Ariana was saying and guessing the direction of the conversation.
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about.” Ariana continued. “Our brains evolved in the physical world. We struggle to intuitively grasp exponential or logarithmic curves, let alone understanding a world beyond three dimensions of space and one of time. Quantum mechanics is as natural to this universe as is an apple falling from a tree. Yet the only reason we don’t intuitively grasp it is because our brain was designed for the apple tree, and not for a quantum one.”
“Let me get this straight –,” Peter said, then he paused thinking it all over. He scratched his head as everyone walked in silence. “I’ve heard people who study string theory talk a about how in physics quantum mechanics and gravity are not compatible mathematically unless you add more than three dimensions of space?”
Hezekiah help up his hand. “Please dumb this down for me. I want to understand you but my eyes are glazing over. I think you’re saying you can somehow understand things better now. But how?”
“Let me try.” Ariana said. “I hate to use the cliché example of a two-dimensional world. But it’s the only way I can simplify it down.” She opened her notepad and pulled out a piece of paper. Holding it up above her head she showed it to the others. “Imagine a piece of paper.” She paused, and screwed the piece of paper up and dropped it into a bin then pointed toward the tiled floor they were walking over. “Actually no. Imagine you lived on this floor we are all walking on. It’s a 2D world so you can’t look up from your floor world. All you can do is look across the floor. So all you can see as I walk across this floor are my steps appearing and disappearing. Actually, you wouldn’t see my shoes, you’d just see these random lines appearing and disappearing. Now imagine you’re a smart person in this floor world.”
Hezekiah felt like she was singling him out when she said that.
Ariana continued. “You start to build models of your world and make predictions. You realise at the start of each day at around nine AM a big influx of these lines appear, randomly scattered all over the place. So, as all good researches do, you decide to collect more data and improve your model. You don’t know why, but you start to see these ten patterns of lines that appear multiple times each day. Now after months and months of recording these lines you realise that these ten line patterns always come in pairs. Once coming in.” She pointed up the hall. “And once going out.” She pointed back down the hall.
Hezekiah at this point was guessing what Ariana was trying to say. She was trying to explain that with enough observation you’d start to learn that ten people walk in and out of the building each day.
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Ariana stopped walking and turned around. It was the first time she had acknowledged their presence fully on this walk. “Now you might build a model that is a reasonable approximation for when these ten patterns appear each day. But alas no matter how hard you try to improve your model, you can never quite predict to the level of accuracy that is useful. And you never would. In your 2D world you’ll never be able to properly model the way myself or my nine other colleagues walk. You wouldn’t have the full and complete picture because you don’t understand a 3D world.”
“If I understand your analogy correctly.” Peter said. “You’re saying that our brain evolved to think in three dimensions of space, and one in time. And thus, we can’t intuitively grasp a world, or mathematics, in four dimensions and beyond? But somehow with the additional computing power you’ve added. You can.”
“Exactly..”
Peter interrupted her. “You remind me of an old friend Atlas when you say that.”
“I knew Atlas before… Well before he left. He was a smart man. But he wasn’t this smart. Anyways as I was saying, Einstein was famous for doing thought experiments. But thought experiments just aren’t’ possible unless you intuitively grasp higher dimensional space. But now I can vividly imagine these worlds.”
“What’s it like?” Hezekiah asked.
“I wish I were a poet. We should try giving this gift to a poet. For now that analogy I provided was the best description I can provide.”
“How does what you added to your brain matrix work?” Peter scratched the top of his head. “By giving your matrix more power? More memory? Haven’t we tried that before?”
“No, almost the opposite. Do you know what a neural network is?”
“An early AI? One of those old ones used to create narrow artificial intelligences?”
“Yes, that exactly.” Ariana said. “We trained up one of those models. Then physically built it and added it into my brain matrix. Wired everything together so it’s one unit. And now it’s an added layer of my matrix that I can use. The same way the neocortex was built on top of our older brain. This new… I call it the neuralcortex was built directly on top of my neocortex.”
The four of them continued walking in silence thinking about what was just discussed. Hezekiah guessed it was almost an inevitability that something like that would happen. What Ariana had describe was different from any other brain argumentation he had heard of. Usually it was just giving them more power. Or connecting the brain to the worlds encyclopedia. Hezekiah had heard of some experiments where people connected brain matrixes to massive power sources and bigger hardware. Those people could spend hundreds of years thinking about a problem in a blink of an eye. Some of these people even connected their brains to the internet so they knew everything and had years to solve problems. But it never really created the kinds of breakthroughs people were expecting. So maybe Ari was right. Maybe it required a different kind of brain. A completely different way of thinking.
They arrived at the entrance of the research facility. The door was white and had no window so Hezekiah couldn’t see beyond it.
Ariana scanned her card then opened the door. “I’m going to show you some of the new technology we built.”
Hezekiah walked toward the door. And it wasn’t what he was expecting, out the door led directly onto the moon surface. There were rockets and robotic machinery moving around. He saw one of the large machine that had six large legs and a manipulator at the front. He remembered it’s nickname was an eleph-ANT.
Peter walked through first. As soon as he crossed the threshold of the door he was suddenly wearing a spacesuit. Gravity changed too and Hezekiah watched him begin to bounce.
Hezekiah went to walk through the door when Unity tapped him on the shoulder. “While Dr Barns shows off some of her inventions, can we talk briefly?”
Hezekiah felt disappointed. He really wanted to see what Ari had built. But he also knew it wasn’t mandatory he knew. “Sure, what is it?”
Unity motioned for the two of them to walk further down the hall. It was a short walk to a new door. This time it was a small office. Unity opened the door and the two of them walked inside.
As soon as the door close Unity spoke, “Mr Rutherford is headed here.”
“The CEO?”
Unity nodded. “He’s going to intercept you two before you leave.”
“So what? Why are you telling me? Why not tell Peter?”
“I think you should make yourself scarce when he comes.”
Hezekiah was confused, he’d met Yaya Rutherford before and never known he should avoid him. He was known to always get his way and was a very controlling individual, but what powerful person wasn’t. “You look concerned. What’s going to happen when he gets here?”
“Well I’ve never known Mr Rutherford to lose. He always gets what he wants. He’s ruthless and determined. And I’ve heard that he’s been meeting with the board. He’s going to shut down this little project.”
Hezekiah wore a puzzled look on his face. “Peter owns the company. They can’t shut what he wants down.”
“And he’s the CEO. He’s been the CEO the whole time Peter was in jail. It’s not like people won’t be loyal to him. I remember when the old chairman of the board and him disagreed. I heard they had a disagreement then the next day the chairman was gone. The chairman of the board was gone.” A little bit of panic crossed Unity’s face as she said that.
“So what?”
“He fired the chairman! The CEO is meant to report to the chairman, not the other way around.”
“So you think he’ll somehow get rid of Peter? Kick him out of his own company.”
Read the full chapter 5 here. “Quite possibly, especially if he thinks it’s for the good of the company.”
“I still don’t understand why you’re telling me this,” Hezekiah said.
“I’m telling you because Peter will be okay. He’s rich, even if they force him to sell half his shares, he’ll still be one of the richest people in the world. But you, you’ll probably lose your job here. You’ll be collateral damage through this whole process.”
“I’ve known Peter for centuries. He wouldn’t leave me out to dry.”
“Peter might not have a choice. If it gets to that point he might be back in jail and he might not have time to protect you.”
“He’s not going back to jail.”
“Probably not. But I still don’t think it’s worth you taking the risk. I know you’ve never seen it. But I’ve heard stories, the CEO doesn’t lose.”
Hezekiah considered those words for a moment. “How long do we have?” [continue the next chapter here]