From the author
I wrote this sketch some time ago as a kind of creative rethinking of the story that I set out here , as well as its possible further development with some free fantastic assumptions. Of course, all this is only partially inspired by the real experience of the author, making it possible to try to answer the question: “What if? ..”
There is also a certain plot linkage to my literary cycle “Notes of a Zadrotik,” some of which I regularly post on LiteRes (however, getting to know them is not necessary at all, since their scientific basis is very, very shaky, which not everyone can like )
Further text is provided unchanged.
Thanks from the author
Dedicated to the memory of two Stephens, with whom I was fortunate enough to live on the same historical stretch and who were able to revolutionize my experience in using electronic devices:
Stephen Cole Kleeney (Klein) (1909 - 1994)
Steven Paul (Steve) Jobs (1955 - 2011)
I also express respect to all the authors and participants of the series “Black Mirror” .
A separate tribute to my colleagues - in library work and in general. Well, and to those to whom the Tambov wolf is a colleague, I am also immensely grateful: without you, this work would certainly not have appeared! ..
Thanks for the support also to all those who warmly received the first Zadrotik's Notes.
A few introductory words for readers
This is not a sequel to the main plot of Zadrotik's Notes, and not even a prequel to it. The specific time of action does not play a role here at all. However, the action itself, as such, is almost not observed, and the binding to the story of Nastya is moderately arbitrary (although, I hope you will like such a story arch). Nevertheless, it is highly recommended for reading to everyone who has already loved “Notes”, as well as to those who prefer a more “solid” genre foundation to various excessively fabulous stories. If at times it may seem difficult for someone to digest all this, then believe me: in the process of writing, I myself felt even worse.
\ *
Everything is not what it seems ... Even yesterday I seemed to myself not what I seem now and what I will seem tomorrow.
That was exactly my status on VKontakte (or is it still correct - on VKontakte? ) Until today. From now on, I will no longer appear to be anyone, nor ... I simply will not .
Well, that is, I myself had long suspected that I was simply not there, and everything that was happening to me was just imagining ... to someone else there.
Ready to prove it to everyone :-) Where is the evidence of my activities on the same Internet? There are almost none. All my contacts with the outside world are also very limited. Meeting me by chance is generally rare luck (recently, some have been very lucky). Agree: it’s a typical case for someone’s bad dream ...
Or maybe there is no life on Earth at all for a long time, and I may be the only surviving fragment from the snapshot of the collective mind sent once to the global information field by desperate dying humanity? ..
The only thing that is encouraging in this scenario is that since it was really destined to survive only a cast of the mind of such a complete loser, as I, therefore, humanity was indeed doomed from the very beginning, by virtue of the very fact of its existence ... Because my own life - or those pathetic attempts at it that fell to my lot - will soon come to an end.
I myself decided so for myself - quite consciously and unshakably. Why continue to multiply the suffering in the world - whether your own or someone else's? Moreover, I have always been categorically against suicide in any form. But he will not be. Tonight, I'm just initiating a process of erasing myself from reality - final and irrevocable. You must admit that this will be the best and extremely elegant proof of the truth of my theory (that is ... hypotheses, of course! I forget all the time that theories are with Einstein or Darwin, and mine still has to grow and grow to such a high-sounding epithet).
Besides the fact that from time immemorial, experimenters in the interests of science and trying to confirm their own innocence, set experiments on themselves personally, no one will suffer from this action for another reason either: my disappearance will be almost invisible to everyone - simply because as I mentioned, few have ever noticed me before. Consequently, my absence will remain equally unnoticed ... Although, strictly speaking, since I will be erased not only from space, but also from time, the last statement will be true for any of the people. However, in my case, due to the above reasons, even the changed - due to my removal from it - the reality will be so slightly different from the original that truly these changes can be neglected for the good of science.
Hah, you ask, what about the fact that humanity will know about my discovery if I myself will no longer be, and therefore, I will not be able to enjoy this myself? And will the evidence of the invention itself remain if all references to the inventor are actually erased from reality? Well, I took care of that too. It’s just that the trigger of the process will work at the right time, and I’ll self-dismiss, but my brainchild, in theory, should not be affected by this process’s fan. As for myself, to be honest, I have always been little concerned with the question of my own continued existence in a purely everyday sense, such as whether I get a wife, later have children, or get some other livestock. What does all this matter on a global scale? .. I am sincerely sorry for all those idiots who believe that their own genetic code for some reason is so important for the Universe that it must be preserved and transmitted to future humanity. Is any of you ready to agree with the indisputable fact that your own unique and inimitable personality is just one of the vast number of endlessly sorted options on a universal quantum computer, a random pattern on the web of reality? That reality, whose only goal is precisely the endless enumeration of options in order to find the best for its further complication and development.
Einstein, it seems, once noticed that God does not play dice. Of course he doesn’t play - he just goes through the options. And it’s not God in the usual sense, but only a finite state machine for enumerating all the possibilities. The Turing machine , if you please, is perhaps the most primitive device that can be imagined, and yet theoretically has truly limitless possibilities. True, these opportunities themselves are laid exclusively in the program according to which the machine works and about the true purpose and meaning of which the machine itself, as they say, is not a dream or spirit ... So with our universal machine in general, everything is the same - with the only difference that she initially works on a self-complicating program, but at the same time still not realizing her true nature.
And what is it, this essence? In constant improvement and development of the world? But all this is only a consequence of the permanently programmed tendency toward self-complication - nothing more. By the way, as applied to people, this can be very clearly shown. It seems to some of us that he is all so extraordinary and talented that a little more, and he will do something so outstanding that he will forever glorify his name and change the world for the better.
I must admit that I myself thought so before - I tried to fix various so-called "ingenious" inspirations of my interaural ganglion in the hope that they too would remain centuries old ... I considered this to be the true meaning of my everything else completely worthless existence. He asserted that all kinds of cloud storages entered my life so late, as a result of which I would never return some of my early attempts to creative work, forever gone in the abyss of timelessness along with information carriers where all this was placed. How stupid it looks now, when I finally realized the true essence of things! .. Well, even if, say, I am struck by a fatal attack right now, and my computer’s hard drive is suddenly covered, burying the entire array of those sent to A “cloud” of data that no one can decipher without me anyway - so what? .. The Universe will only make the necessary correction, and after some time there will be another suitable option for further self-complication! But all these so-called "geniuses" are sincerely convinced that everything that they could dream up there is an exceptional kind of their own merit! Yes Yes…
So it’s completely unimportant whether my current idea will succeed or not. It’s just that he himself, after all, is wondering what will come of it! I remember that once in exactly the same way I saw the only goal of my future life in waiting for the new Star Wars - after all, after all, I wonder what will come of it ... It all ended up after watching the Eighth episode , I left the cinema with gloomy thoughts, which boiled down mainly to how nevertheless it was a pity that I had not died a long time ago, and now I already with all the desire not to see it.
So all these sentiments will suffice from me, I certainly won’t wait for the new Avatars, and what’s there for Disney and Marvel in particular for us, now it’s parallel to me! .. Let Disney always be better for me associated with childhood memories - Mickey Mouse, various Ducks and McDucks, a fairy in a green dress from the cartoon screen saver, about which I clearly remember how she flew over the painted castle and put a magic dot on the “i” in the title with her magic wand - and Now everyone is trying to assure that the last ct never happened in real life, citing evidence available on YouTube recording Disney screensavers. Well, you see, I'm still not the first to indulge here with a change in reality ...
True, this time the changes will affect not some stupid fairy, but a very specific person who herself will never know how this or that story will end (emphasize necessary), about which there will be new stories, as the old ones will now be rewritten . But, by and large, all this is completely irrelevant. In the end, there has always been and will be only a very limited number of possible plots, and everything else is nothing more than their endless combinations. That’s why it seems to us so often that we have already seen and read all this somewhere before, even if in reality this is not so ... (And, at least in the case of the new Star Wars, all this is actually so - you can not even doubt it.) The same is with our life as a whole - all these numerous so-called “deja vu” are exactly the same consequences of a strictly limited number of scenarios played by life. Lost on a soulless program on a universal machine, as detached and indifferent to everyone as the people around me are to me ...
\ * {2}
How did I get to such a life , you ask? Well, you have to start from afar.
The fact is that, by the will of the circumstances, over the past few years, I was forced to parse electronic copies of paper questionnaires filled by clients with entering their results into the appropriate databases. The work was initially painstaking and ungrateful, which could drive anyone crazy if not for one circumstance ...
At some point, the process of studying repetitive, standard parts in various sample questionnaires encouraged me to try to create a system that can independently extract user data from this mishmash of various characters. Well, not quite on a fully automatic machine, but in any case it’s better than manually sorting and typing the data, agree.
The first such program for my authorship was still exclusively self-written and artisanal - and, frankly, I still can’t really explain why it in most cases did its job. Then I accidentally found a framework suitable for me on the vast expanses of the Internet - well, that is, a library of routines for performing all the necessary operations. The use of this framework was based on regular expressions that were familiar to all computer scientists for a long time, which made it possible to create templates based on them and, finally, ready-made definitions of extracts required by the text, that is, those areas of this text from which to extract values for the templates already described, replacing them with specific text.
How could it be easier to formulate? Well, many of you have probably seen the so-called report log files that look something like this:
127.0.0.1 - - [10 / Jun / 2009: 10: 00: 00 +0000] "GET /example.html HTTP / 1.1" 200 - " example.com " "Mozilla / 4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1 ) "
Even an inexperienced user can be quite obvious that here at some network address (in this case, local), at a certain point in time, an external resource is accessed in order to extract some data using a certain type of browser and operating system. Right? And similar lines from which a clear structure can be distinguished that can be decomposed (divided into separate semantic structures) can be repeated as many times as you like in the report file. A technical specialist studies them, extracts useful information and draws on its basis the necessary conclusions about the operation of specific programs, systems, user actions, etc.
Actually, in nature there is an immense multitude of tools for syntactic decomposition of such structures. Customizing one of these frameworks to my needs, I just expanded its functionality for myself to allow me to select such ordered structures from an arbitrary text an unlimited number of times. And the gaps between them can be filled with any kind of symbols, from the point of view of the program representing simple garbage.
By the way, I still wondered to myself why such a simple idea had not been used in many places before - well, at least I could not find any mention of this kind of activity, and there were almost no reviews on my development. True, I came across one strange guy who sent me an e-mail with thanks and assured me that from now on in his library everyone can now sort out the table of contents of books with the help of such a crap. To myself, I was only surprised at such an unusual scope of my method, and began to think further on what else could be done with this.
The new idea seemed already more insane - I began to develop a tool that would already be able to independently determine all ordered and repeating structures in an arbitrary text. Here, of course, a ready-made standard solution to the problem did not exist yet - we had to connect neural networks, which in general terms are approximate models of our own brain. Well, to the human brains in all the variety of their qualities, we are still far from all, of course - at best, at the moment we can imitate the meaningful activity of a cockroach in this way, nothing more. But, as they say, thanks for that.
And then in the process of work, a new guess suddenly dawned on me: what if the development of our life itself went along approximately the same scenario? Well, that is, from the very beginning there was approximately the same program that was able to extract meaningful DNA sequences of future primitive organisms from an initial chaotic set of characters, and then organize them into the necessary structures? Then, in the process of complicating its own functionality, this program ordered the source code into more and more organized structures until it appeared ... I, who was able to clearly explain how all this works.
\ * {3}
And then here, finally, the true meaning came to me, embodied in the idea of the so-called “regulars” (as we call these same regular expressions in our jargon).
If you have never dealt with such designs before, then perhaps you do not need to start. They look too heavy and unreadable for the uninitiated to isolate from them any useful information.
Although, perhaps, I’ll tell you about one of the most important features. This is the so-called Kleene star (*), placed after the sequence of any characters that we need and meaning that this sequence can be present in our text in this particular place any arbitrary number of times, including not a single one. A genius thing, in fact, opening the way to self-generation of repeating structures. It was named in honor of the famous American mathematician and logician Stephen Kleene, who, in fact, invented these regulars themselves.
And even more interesting is the fact that this Kleene (which, by the way, is still Klein, if you really find fault, but it was so customary in Russia to call him from the first translated editions of his scientific works) worked at about the same time and on the same problems like Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel. If you have not heard about the last two comrades, then I hasten to tell you that the first of them was remembered not only by decoding the German codes of the Enigma encryption machine during the Second World War (by the way, this story itself not so long ago even found its cinema adaptation with Cumberbatch in main role), but also by the very speculative concept of a computer. As for Gödel, he was noted by equally impressive incompleteness theorems, the essence of which in the philistine language could be expressed as the idea of the fundamental impossibility of formalizing arbitrary things through any logically consistent systems. That is, there are things that mathematicians cannot fully formulate in their own language, and I could not write an appropriate program for them, and this is strictly proved.
In general, it is obvious that the last two comrades worked on things of such a high level of abstraction that it is not surprising that both of them slightly went off the roof at the end of their lives. Turing generally accepted the poison that filled the apple that he bitten off, unable to cope with the fact of public rejection of his own homosexuality. But Gödel, although he lived to see the end of the 70s of the last century, began to detect the first signs of mental disorders since the 1930s.
As for Kleene, he was luckier — his bowl seemed to have passed. Kleene’s own theorem also has an impressive formulation: “Every regular set is an automaton language.” Which in translation into everyday language can be approximately expressed as the fact that any ordered structure can be divided into separate elements through calculations using regulars. Actually, that's what I’ve been doing all the time lately.
Of course, in this whole construction lies some kind of huge contradiction. What is it, one big gaping hole, I would say.Indeed, on the one hand, life could somehow have arisen in a mathematical way and self-regulate just as consistently to more and more complex structures, and on the other what? On the other hand, it is obvious that in the process, somehow such things and phenomena arose that simply did not lend themselves to theoretical formalization by virtue of their very nature. Does this mean that nevertheless there is a certain force acting from without? No, here I don’t even want to think and try to build some kind of stupid theories. From me personally, the existing consequences of the work already done were quite enough.
It’s enough, perhaps, already that, being in a constant process of thinking about such things, I didn’t even notice how I lost my completely official and even slightly paid job. The fact is that over time, my mind was less and less occupied with the routine fuss with documents, gradually being increasingly supplanted by constant immersion in theoretical abstractions. And after all, it didn’t matter to anyone that with my previous developments I had already increased the productivity in my native enterprise by an order of magnitude , and I carried out all the processes that somehow somehow required human participation “on the machine” in a matter of minutes! No, someone there was madly worried about the fact of what exactlyI have been doing this for the entire remaining time allotted for work ... In short, arguing with bureaucrats and conjunctuaries is always more expensive, it’s easier to say goodbye to everyone right away.
But then, being left to my own devices, I began to think already about completely wild things, namely, about personal omnipotence.
Remember how once at Tolkien Sauron managed to put the whole essence of his own power in one single ring, thanks to which he remained basically invulnerable for quite a long time even after his own physical disembodiment? Yes, he managed to forge the Ring of omnipotence, and then he himself hunted for it. Well, let me now have no less powerful artifact - my own framework of omnipotence! People will use it, not even suspecting that somewhere in the depths my own bookmarks have been laid, thanks to which I can now control their actions, even having disappeared forever from the physical plane of being! ..
Well, the first experience in this regard was left as a parting gift to the management of my former company, a software package that carries out the lion's share of my previous work duties. Oh, if they only knew what time bomb I had in store for them in this framework ... Well, now I'm ready to repeat the same thing, but on a much more global scale and with far-reaching consequences for everyone.
Frankly, I was very stressed and excited that day, which was scheduled for a test launch of the machine. Conflicting thoughts tormented me. On the one hand, I was afraid that something would happen to me, and I could not complete the experiment. On the other hand, I was aware of its possible consequences for all of humanity, and I was almost ready to give up everything for this reason.
And yet, as luck would have it, it was on this day that a kind of memorable meeting took place. On the way home, my gaze suddenly caught an unfamiliar girl in a crowd in a white and off-season light dress, and for some reason it suddenly seemed to me that I had been waiting for her all my life. Some mischievous lights constantly danced in her eyes, but at the same time, they seemed to reflect an incomprehensible imprint of a big mind, which, as it seemed, did not fit in with the general feeling of youth produced by this obviously female person in all respects. And for some reason, the lack of stockings did not bother her at all even in such an early time of spring, when winter had by no means completely ceded her post to her.
She is already familiar - for me familiar! She almost proportionally passed by, only for a moment honoring me with her gaze and - lo and behold! - It seemed to me, or was it really like a smile? And then something came upon me, so I suddenly, without expecting it, in a completely unusual manner for myself, suddenly and distinctly uttered the cherished message to her:
“Hello!”
And she really turned around and answered:
“Well, you’re straight like a march cat! Probably born in March? Well hello! Let me take a look at you better. Wait a minute, and who will you be with us according to the horoscope? Don’t say that it’s not a fish, but it will be a pity ...
“I'm afraid to upset, but it seems you have not guessed.” In fact, I am Aquarius, a couple of weeks ago I celebrated my birthday. A small error, but still did not fall into your classification. By the way, what data is it on ...
- Well, then I really am really sorry. I’m still looking for a fish for myself, but Aquarius is still in its infancy. But it’s not scary, your time will come! By the way, I have no doubt that everything you do is very, very important. Believe me, I myself have long wanted to find out who I am and where from ...
- What ?! How do you know that I ...
- I'm just an accidental error in your system! Forget about me and continue to work ... ”- then she resolutely walked away, parting casually with a wave of my hand and leaving her in complete sense of prostration.
“Well, again, it’s not fate,” I finally thought, and resolutely went to the house with the firm intention to drive out my final test today.
\*{4}
And now, having reached this place, you are absolutely entitled to ask me: well, you created in your computer a rather convincing, as you think, model of reality, through which you can even calculate and visualize something. But even if this is so, how did you intend to use it to change something in the surrounding reality? After all, your entire computer system is nothing more than an isolated environment, a sandbox, a "virtual machine" ...
Really? And you think that I didn’t take care in advance of the very possibility of creating a kind of loophole in the outside world? Let’s say, I’ll launch my model, and nothing will change drastically. I will not wipe myself, but only some kind of my digital model (or, rather, even a prototype of such a model), and only on my machine. Well, and if now everyone together launches this same thing at home? .. Could this be some kind of digital implementation of such a well-known concept as egregor? Well, that is, from the point of view of the external environment, which is calculating the most probable outcome - all of a sudden, for no reason here and now, thousands of in-game bots suddenly wished for just such a development of events. Should the system itself be tuned?
But no - so no ... Therefore, I will stay alive to be glad that I was mistaken.
Why will I be happy? Well, it’s just that in all this world order I initially see some kind of doom. Judge for yourselves: we are doomed not only to rummage around in this jar forever, like Colorado beetles caught by someone on his own personal plot, and hopelessly try to find a way out of it until we die every time.
Moreover, this desire to penetrate the barrier is for some reason initially inherent in the human race. Although, it would seem, any environment hostile to us, according to the logic of things, should inevitably seem to us destructive. However, we are always persistently looking for loopholes for ourselves where, it would seem, they are reliably hidden by the system itself from all sorts of harmful influences.
Is that so? .. Tell me: have you ever had to, for example, catch a virus on your computer through a browser? Theoretically, it is also a kind of isolated environment for your operating system, however ... Who will stop you from opening any file downloaded from outside the Internet with completely unpredictable consequences for yourself? And if you do not leave such a loophole with external launch from the outside, all sorts of bugs from the Internet, then would you like to use this Internet yourself? For example, even though I love my iPad, I constantly find myself thinking that with this gadget it’s difficult to get rid of some kind of sterility, as if something is constantly missing ... But this is only a tablet, but with a serious computer this is generally hard to imagine.
Therefore, we ourselves are creating a kind of loophole for the purpose of breaking through the protective barrier. Actually, this has been the case since the days of the Garden of Eden, when God directly said that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil grows here, but you don’t pick the fruits from it, much less eat it, otherwise ... Well, the rest you know is human curiosity led to a completely logical result.
But what happened these days? At first, none other than Alan Turing, an unhappy genius from a closed “sharashka” of the war period and a homosexual rejected by society in the post-war era, actually led us into the world of computer computing by hand, and then he committed a symbolic suicidal act by biting a poisoned apple. Then, someone Steve Jobs made this most bitten apple the logo of his company, which created at such an opportune time both the first MASSIVE personal computer, and the first equally MASSIVE smartphone (that is, the computer in the phone), and the same tablet (this same notorious iPad, with whom I am currently printing this text). Since then, the Pandora's box has completely opened.
Well, there’s also a certain Nick Bostrom who added fuel to the fire, declaring our whole world nothing more than a computer simulation, and popular personalities like the same Elon Mask in every possible way picked up and replicated this idea.
And now such a unique person has appeared, like me, who has popularly explained to you how this very Universe can work, using the ideas already known at this time. So go ahead - you were unequivocally given quite specific instructions for transforming the world. Properly using all of what I told you about, you can turn the mountains! So let the computational model described by me become your own framework of omnipotence!
Or ... do you still feel some inescapable aftertaste of poison throughout my text? .. Perhaps the viral character of this message that is so clearly readable still somehow prevents you from trying to check its contents? In the end, what is it that personally keeps you from immediately REMOVING this document from all your gadgets IMMEDIATELY? Is the forbidden fruit still as attractive as before? .. In fact, well, just stop even thinking about all this, betray me, as the author, a deserved symbolic death ! Until recently, you didn’t even think about me, did you? Well, just do not think in the future! Erase me from your own reality! ..
If only this helps, of course. But I'm afraid that the Universe will be corrected again, and there will be a new madman who will no longer be as loyal to you as I am.
In general, I did everything I could and said everything I wanted. The final choice, I still leave for you. For sim, as they say, everything ...