Odvin once again looked over at the clock.

•||• - •••• - •••• - •••| - •|••

It was time to get moving. 

The news had broken around || spans into the day. *

Not really exactly at "||" ... It was a gradual, fluid thing - people waking up, learning about what had been happening overnight, seeing what was known about events and the timeline so far, hearing what other people were starting to understand. 

But Odvin was tracking the news, coming to terms with the situation ... Something like a mark or so into "||" ? - and it seemed like that was basically the thing everyone everywhere was doing at that moment in time. The moment had that feeling. 

... and now it was already passing "||•" ... Well, it was past ||• spans by a single breath and |•• beats... another randomly selected person probably wouldn't even say that part of the time if they were telling you the time - but Odvin had a cluster of mental reflexes associated with looking at a clock and seeing that neat row of |•••• "•"s start to disappear when the clock was beating its way into a new span. 

 

It was a sign to get moving on a new activity - or at least Odvin, as an individual, had built up habits as a person and become someone who tended to react that way - Odvin had set up their life around a rhythm like that, as much as one could live by a rhythm of activities broken up with the |•|• spans of a day.

 

Time felt scarce now, but thinking about all the features of the world and the implications for decisions associated with that feeling of "time is scarce now" was a lot of what Odvin had been doing for the last |• spans. It was truly a ridiculous thing to worry about for so long. 

Short on time? Spend |• spans of that scarce resource in large part agonizing about how little was left. 

Hilarious. Someone else would even have smiled at the thought.

* Units of Time on Origin

The Planet of Origin uses decimal time. 

A day is broken up into 10 "spans." (2 hours and 24 minutes)

A span is 10 "marks." (14 minutes and 24 seconds)

A mark is 10 "runs." (86.4 seconds)

A run is 10 "breaths." (8.64 seconds)

A breath is 10 "beats." (0.864 seconds)

These words are approximate translations into English.

"Beat" shares the root word in "heartbeat" since 0.864 seconds is sorta, kinda, about the average length of a heartbeat - 

"Breath" has the connotation of "take a breath" (slowly and deliberately) and 8.64 seconds is a pretty good length of time for a slow deep breath - 

A "run" would have the connotation of "run and grab something," where actually physically running to do something quickly wouldn't be a noteworthy exertion of stamina, or phrases like "give me a minute" in Earth slang -

"Marks" would have a connotation like the smallest marks you'd make on a sundial, or "take 15 minutes" in Earth slang -

"Spans" have a connotation of truly long stretches of time, as in the time it takes for whole activities, not just individual subtasks.

Origin additionally has words for "deci-beats" (⅒ beats) and "centi-beats" (⅒ deci-beats) ... etc. etc. 

If you want a clock in decimal time, just call the day "1" and figure out how long it has been since midnight as a decimal fractional notation of 1.

0.60014 of a day, 2:24 pm or 14:24 on an Earth clock, would be "6 spans, 0 marks, 0 runs, 1 breath, 4 beats."

 

Reading a Clock on Origin

The Planet of Origin uses binary as the basis for its numerals and artithmetic.

This means the clocks are displayed in the binary numerals corresponding to the numbers 0 through 9 in base 10. 

They do not use Arabic numerals, "Arabic numerals" being the shapes "0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9" 

(The "Arabic numerals" would look even stranger to someone from Origin than Earth's "Kaktovik numerals." The person from Origin would ask why you were drawing your numbers that way if the shapes didn't even correspond to any properties of the numbers.)

They draw "1" like this: | 

And they draw "0" like this: • 

Sometimes they draw 0 like a little line, about a quarter of the height of the numeral for 1. The short bar form of the numeral for 0 has some useful properties. 

So, on the display of a clock at midnight, instead of 

0000 - 0000 - 0000 - 0000 - 0000 

You see

•••• - •••• - •••• - •••• - •••• 

And 3 beats after midnight ( || in Origin numerals)

•••• - •••• - •••• - •••• - ••||

If you are having trouble reading Origin numerals, you can display them on your fingers like this 

(Someone on Earth may find it entertaining to show a friend how to count to 4 in binary on their fingers!)

A raised finger would represent a | in the Origin numerals, a lowered finger would represent a •

So, 9 beats would pass from midnight and the "beats" segment at the end of the clock would display |••| 

Then on the tenth beat it would tick over into displaying 

•••• - •••• - •••• - •••| - ••••

... or one breath after midnight. 

Children on Origin also find reading their clocks unintuitive! Though they have an easier time learning to read clocks than children on Earth.

But, still, almost all the other occasions on Origin where you see a display of numbers ticking up, you would see |••| followed by |•|• followed by |•|| 

Having things tick back to •••• after only |••| units have been counted is really unintuitive for a small kid on Origin. That's not how their toys work! Base 10 is weird! Why are there 10 things in that set instead of 2 or 4 or 8 or 16 things?! 

An Origin adult will reply to this question somewhat sheepishly by saying that's just how time is accounted in their society. They have no idea how sheepish Earth adults must feel when they are asked similar questions!

The plan: min-max seeking solitude and simplicity. 

Odvin was already moving around the housing unit, getting started on packing. 

The housing unit was... somewhat more than was usual... in a disorderly condition at the moment. 

Odvin had pulled some cables out of the wall some time ago and hacked through them with a roughing* knife. The unit no longer had grid power, audiovisual, or compute connectivity. 

 

Odvin hauled a pack out of a small storage cupboard - a shoulder harnessed travel bag - leather, rugged. A single sealable watertight outer skin and interior separator system for organizing items. 

Odvin began throwing some clothing items and other miscellaneous equipment onto the still-unfurled bedroll. 

 

The bedroll wouldn't be coming along. It was foam and not at all lightweight travel-ready gear.

 

Roughing pants with deep pockets, not waterproof, but with separable layers for fast drying - if you wanted to take the time to disassemble them. 

An undershirt and legwear, plus another set to throw in the bag - two (|•) pieces each of lightweight high thread-count woven synth-fabric - ideal for protecting the skin from pinching, friction, or scraping from other clothing, equipment, or simple body movement. 

A roughing overcoat - durable, fitted, inner and outer pockets, a collapsible rain hood stowed under the collar between the shoulders, gloves similarly stowed in the cuffs of both sleeves. 

A belt with standardized clips for a sheath, or similar equipment items one might want in easy reach. The sheath and the roughing knife was the only thing Odvin was bringing along which would attach to the belt. Odvin's portable datalink and network-independent-compute device was... thoroughly disassembled... in the kitchen sink. 

Foot-anatomy conforming laced shoes. Sufficient protection from most terrain, good grip surfacing on the soles, yet light and flexible. 

 

Alright, items for the bag:

A large blanket, ideal for folding up for padding as a seat or to wrap oneself in for warmth. 

A kettle and a water container. Odvin thankfully had filled the water container yesterday, there wouldn't be any need to agonize over trust in the local clean-water system. 

A packet of many days worth of electrolyte-balanced salt powder. 

A packet a few days worth of dried meats, and a packet of dried fruits and nuts. 

A packet of a few days worth of rice grains. 

Sure... A bound sheath of paper and an ink pen. It would feel strange not to have any external information storage, even if Odvin didn't expect to need it - it was lightweight enough. 

 

And... That was it. This would be Odvin's gear for the expected remaining days (spans? ... marks??) of human history. 

Suit up. 

* Roughing

Origin has a few categories for "types of physical activities." 

The two (|•) most relevant to Odvin's lifestyle are "roughing" and "conditioning." 

Roughing would be a general category covering Origin's equivalents of Earth's "hiking," "mountain climbing," "camping," "wilderness survival," etc.

Conditioning would be a general category covering Origin's equivalents of Earth's "exercise," "gyms," "physical training," "sports," etc.

 

A "roughing knife" would be recognizable to Earthlings as a "survival knife."

Odvin will not just be stepping out of their housing unit without a plan. 

Having on the clothes helps with this. The cached pattern of behavior is different. There is a different mode Odvin's mind is entering compared to a day heading into town for a job or for a personal-growth, self-actualization or conditioning activity... This isn't even the kind of outfit for a day out in the wilderness. 

The roughing Odvin does in an outfit like this is rarer than almost every other activity in their life, but it is always... more involved. It's a type of activity which uses more of yourself - at least, if you are doing the challenging kinds of roughing, the type with an elaborate objective designed for your skill level.

In the type of roughing Odvin does, there wouldn't be just be the expected | to |• unfamiliar problems to solve, but more than |•••• complex interconnected unfamiliar problems. You would have to triage dealing with the most important problems, track ranges of possible outcomes for each decision, anticipate what others would be able to accomplish with their own resources...

Odvin's latest occasion wearing this sort of gear was... Something like |• ^ |••• days ago. || out of |••| parts of the year ago, or thereabouts.*

Winter instead of Harvest. Some time after the Solstice. It was a uniquely difficult ||| day session in the nearby mountains range. Overland tracking and retrieval out in the cold. Insurance for catastrophic mishaps during the event was only reasonably priced since Odvin is just that good. 

It had been a busy |• seasons since, and while jobs and games in the meantime had occasions to be done in heavy duty work gear, this was different. This was an outfit for games of improvisation and tests of skill in dynamic and inhospitable environments. 

 

So, now Odvin was thinking in that mode. In a run or two they would be breaking cover, leaving the housing unit. They would spend a few breaths looking around, and then spending a run to literally physically run to an ideal spot to break from the the paved housing-area walking trail. 

They would be able to get within tree cover quickly enough, and Odvin did not really expect to be spotted. There weren't the sounds on helicopter in the air... and they were strongly betting on planes being grounded... There almost certainly wouldn't be anyone watching the housing unit. This wasn't that sort of roughing game. Odvin hoped it wasn't that sort of roughing game. 

The Thing might have allies, but it wouldn't be spending them on that kind of work. Odvin guessed not at least. 

Satellite coverage may pin them down, a few frames here and there with a low resolution image, a good guess about what scenario each bit of information most likely corresponded to, especially given a psychological profile available from every bit of information about Odvin out there in captured hardware...

They would be located. A probability distribution over where in the world the entity "Odvin" had been and where they will be seems entirely like something that could be worked out by the Thing - but it wouldn't be right now. Odvin would almost certainly not have to deal with other people getting their bearings on Odvin's location and heading - then putting together some sort of mission to track them through the mountain range. 

From the nearby tree cover Odvin was aiming for, they could make it to their planned campsite before sunset without needing to cross through any more settled areas. There was a reason someone like Odvin rented space in a housing-area like this one. Not for access to that specific campsite - it wasn't a site they had visited in the last ||•• years - but just... to be someplace where the wilds were substantially accessible. 

 

Mainline plan settled. Time to go. 

* Math on Origin

256 ÷ 365 is not a difficult problem for someone from Origin to do in their head. Really.

If you just use binary you don't need to break the year up into memorized approximate ratios like 12 months in a year and 52 weeks in a year. Just do some division in your head. It's binary, long division is something you do when you're still 7 or 8 years old. 

You will often see on Origin a calendar spread over 5 pages, since many will want to have fewer tiles representing days per page - and someone from Origin would immediately recognize 5 and 73 as divisors of 365 - but breaking things down to "months" and "weeks" isn't really a thing on this planet.

(Actually, Odvin was basically competent in division tasks by |•| years old.)

 

Open the door and step out. Position back heel to kick off the door ledge... Half crouch, look around. 

No one in sight, good. The air is... A breeze. Smoke? 

There is smoke in the distance... The direction of the township.

...

Put it out of mind - Odvin is not heading in the direction of the township - they aren't seeking to interact with others at all. 

Odvin has no one they have committed to protecting or aiding, no outstanding debts - no informal favors - no one even to say goodbye to. 

 

Time to run.

Physical exertion is never really easy if you're doing it properly, but spending energy and pushing various limits can become simple and fluid. 

Conditioning is all about this.

Put someone on a simulated glacier surface, give them spiked metal boots, a sled, and a stack of concrete blocks taller than they are.

How fast can you load the sled? How quickly can you move the stack of blocks to the other side of the room? How fast can you get the sled moving over the ice? How quickly can you stop a loaded sled? 

To those who want to train their bodies, to become more competent physically, conditioning like this becomes a frequent part of their lives.

Odvin has numerous spent |• ^ ||| day spans, about | part in || of a year, doing |• day cycles of activities like these - on simulated glaciers, ankle deep in simulated swamps, on lattices of netting, climbing simulated cliff faces...

So, leaving their housing unit today, Odvin moves like a predatory cat.

Leaves and dirt forming slopes on the edge of the path are caught with toes and turned into additional friction to push off the ground. Odvin's upper body remains steady on a horizontal plane like a boat cutting through the air. Their stride is just long enough to catch the ground at the right angle to shove them ahead faster and faster. Cornering happens exactly when and where the terrain is convenient to provide additional traction against the acceleration. 

This is not a sustainable pace - though Odvin could keep it up for several runs of time, if necessary. Today it isn't, and on less familiar and uncultivated ground it would be much riskier. 

They will slow down when they are out of sight, and then they will only slow down moderately - to conserve stamina and to properly acknowledge the risks of unfamiliar and wild terrain. Then, Odvin will briefly stop after creating a run's distance from the walking path, to the get their bearings properly and plan their travel to the camping site. 

For now, the game is a matter of focus, skill, power, and moment-to-moment reactions.

Odvin had been off the path and in the trees for several breaths before reaching a slope, steep but tightly bound by foliage. 

The climb is easy enough, though Odvin is steady and careful about the task - the branches and vines were pessimal enough to jab flesh or tangle a limb were someone to be incautious with the obstacle. The height near the crest was enough to deal a serious injury if one were to fall. 

And then Odvin reached the top, and it was time to pause, to survey and plan. 

 

The forest is not entirely quiet. Distant birdsong. Some animals in the leaves above and forest floor around. There is a feeling of fullness to this part of the world. 

 

Alright. Nothing visible in the direction of the housing area. No sounds of approaching people. 

 

This... Was actually not really a situation where this exact type of tension and caution was warranted. Everything Odvin could model about the shape of the world's crisis predicts that the lethal danger would come suddenly, from an angle Odvin could not foresee...

Was there even a point in trying to be careful about this? The sort of opponent Origin - the whole civilization - was facing was not the type of opponent where skill would prove useful. 

 

Odvin crouched and breathed deeply. They tried to push these sorts of thoughts out of their mind. However ridiculous it was at this point, the act of building up and deploying certain habits was not one Odvin would entirely abandon in a situation where those habits had become futile. 

What's next? 

Reckoning by sunlight and knowing the rough location and precise orientation of their housing, the ridgeline Odvin was aiming for should be roughly |• ^ |•|• paces by equal Anti-Spin and Up... Perhaps another bit in the Anti-Spin component... Odvin did not actually bring along a compass. This is not actually a challenge to navigate. The geographic topology is familiar enough in this area for visual navigation by line of sight terrain identification to be fully sufficient. *

 

Being here felt... Done. They had settled their mind on the prospect of becoming entangled with some ongoing events immediately upon exiting their dwelling. They had rested from their brief intense exertion.

This was not the place Odvin wanted to be right now. It was time to travel to a place from long distant memories. 

Odvin stood up and began to move at a steady sustainable pace through the wilderness. 

* Distance and Direction on Origin

Distance:

What does a measurement system look like on a world that uses binary? 

Well, humans generally have hands, arms, and legs. This does not make for a very precise foundation for a measurement system, but it is one which is accessible enough to be universal by the time anyone tries to bolt precision onto it. 

A human finger is roughly 7-8cm long.

Double that and you've got roughly the length of a hand with fingers extended. ≈15cm 

Double that and you've got roughly the length of a forearm. ≈30cm

Double that and you've got roughly the length of a step. ≈60cm 

Double that and you've got roughly the length of a pace (returning to the same foot forward.) ≈120cm 

So, a common unit of overland distances on Origin would be multiples of |• ^ |•|• (2^10 = 1024) paces. ≈ 1.229 km

Direction: 

Origin happens to have a culture which likes to put concepts into people's grasp. Something about how the world has all sorts of delightfully accessible and manipulable regularities when your mental tools neatly work to parse it. 

So, what do they do when they figure out what sort of thing the planet they're on is? Name the cardinal directions by something you can "hold in your hand." 

Curl the fingers of your right hand into a "thumbs up" gesture. The four fingers are the direction of rotation for the earth. "Spin" would be from West to East by Earth's reckoning, "Anti-Spin" would be East to West. The thumb points "Up." This last part of the cardinal directions is arbitrary - except that, similar to Earth, most people on Origin are right handed. 

 

Odvin is musing about polar coordinates on the space of these cardinal directions. Explaining the "another bit" portion of that would be getting into what Origin uses instead of "360 degrees" in a polar coordinate system. Which, might be fairly obvious if you're designing the system from first principles around binary, instead of divisions of 360... 

"Another bit in Anti-Spin" would be moving halfway again towards Anti-Spin from the "45°" vector between Up and Anti-Spin. 

•||• - •••| - ••|• - ••|| - ••••

Odvin had been walking for around a mark before reaching the target ridgeline.

They were absentmindedly tapping a pocket on the overcoat where a small weight was resting, and considering the following:

Take on a minor challenge? Why not? 

They were still thinking, ruminating on the events of the last few years, and the current travel was not actually engaging enough to be a distraction except in moments where Odvin deliberately focused on features of the environment - 

In those moments some things, which were usually just subconscious background considerations, would displace the brooding. Features of the terrain, the speed and direction of the wind, the local economy of sunlight and nutrients which decided the shape and distribution of foliage... 

Then those thoughts would slip away and Odvin would be once again thinking of the Project, of those people with hardware in their skulls, of the apology and final sign-off on the network this morning... How much were those people wrong about? How much of Odvin's studies over the last few years can still be verified through Odvin's own skills?

And then the thought: How much longer does the planet have? 

 

It was time for a distraction. Odvin reached into that overcoat pocket. 

And they withdrew an RNG set.

A set of |•• octagonal prisms with square center knockouts. Each facet marked and colored to make it distinguishable. 

You could throw one in the air and catch it flat on one of the pair of the largest surfaces.  | or  •

This was actually all the RNG you'd ever need. Just a randomness source for | and • could be turned into an arbitrarily precise random fractional number - just flip it for every position. 

Still, why not also build in a source for ••, •|, |•, || as well as a source for the first |••• numerals? Why not carry around a set of |•• such RNG sources for multiples of those components?

Odvin tossed an RNG. 

•

Alright, minimize elevation for the remainder of the path. 

... Well, dry ground elevation. Odvin would not be going for a swim. They were not in the mood for doing that when it wasn't necessary. 

The ritual and the subsequent thoughts did make Odvin smile slightly. 

One of their first serious games while roughing had been a coordination challenge between |••• participants. 

Travel out individually to a randomly assigned starting point in a region. The goal is to form a single group of |••• people. The rules were simple. 

In a day, one could only travel along a specific vector they generated by RNG that morning - the vectors weighted to tend to keep all participants in a bounded map area. 

You could not diverge from that vector by more than |••• paces. You could choose to camp overnight at any point along that vector. 

You would inform all other participants via data link of your camp coordinates each night, but they would only have a probablistic model of the vector you would generate the following day based on those coordinates. 

Uniting required coordinating around intersecting vectors. Reasoning where to search and where to attempt to signal other participants. Finding out where vectors intersected, and then attempting to reach those points simultaneously to join the parties. 

 

The game was interesting. Not the most challenging roughing game Odvin had played, but satisfying and entertaining. 

 

Odvin continued on their way, along the lowest trails of the ridgeline - finding each local minimum and following it, moving up elevation only when they could tell the true minimum required that course. 

It was something to do other than thinking about the imminent destruction of everything. 

... 

Step step step.

Slopes meeting at their base, flat ground, bushes.

Jumping, landing. Walking...

Pick a yellowing leaf off of a branch, crush it between fingers...

 

Okay. Odvin appears to be failing at the task of thinking about something other than current events. 

Not actually very surprising, given the situation.

Doing the slightly more engaging activity of navigation while under an arbitrary challenge does feel like it's loosened up something though. 

There is a kind of rhythm and fullness to the thoughts now, instead of something more harried and tangled Odvin felt the need to push away earlier.

It's time to review the events and try to pin down the facts...

 

Actually, the journey will take up more than a span. Go back to the begining. Does Odvin trust the Organization?

Origin does many things differently than Earth.

For example, in the 20th century, Earth decided to study dolphin communication. This was a small effort by those who had the status of "researchers." 

Origin did not study dolphin language the way Earth did. Origin built a city where the residents were people for whom interacting with dolphins was appealing enough to fund expansive public works to that end. 

'Sea Bound' - a city which was tied, bound into a coexistence, with its local ocean waters - was founded, and a dolphin population was enticed to coexist with the humans via the habitat of the city's canals. 

Dolphins do well enough as inhabitants of a human city, and Origin's culture is mostly treating them as intelligent, whimsical, and strange aliens by this point - enough for many to refer to them by the pronoun previously used nearly exclusively for humans or mostly human fictional characters - those people arguing the word is useful mainly for communicating sapience, and thus should be extended to our bright and talkative cousins. 

 

What does Origin do about things like nuclear weapons and mind control research and advanced biotech...?

In the middle of the 20th Century on Earth, the CIA believed it might be possible to control human minds with drugs and intelligently crafted stimulus. They set out to test this. 

They believed it was possible, and they exposed civilization to knowledge about which drugs and methods were tried to achieve this end. 

They gave LSD to college students believing it might be a method for facilitating mind-control via suggestion. They allowed research subjects to gain knowledge of what drugs were being tested.

They were destroying whatever trust the world placed in them, they were playing an adversarial game against other humans where they believed this kind of escalation benefited them, and they were careless and foolish about who was going to be able to follow their lines of inquiry into the subject.

Earth has intelligence agencies. Origin has something not even mostly similar. 

Origin has The Organization. 

 

What happens when you are not in a tense adversarial geopolitical situation when someone discovers self-propagating fission reactions? 

On Origin the answer is obvious - someone tells everyone that the field of physics has become substantially more powerful. 

Then, people figure out what sort of skills and structures need to be in place to handle very powerful physics - and those things get built. 

 

And when you already have a global structure set up for managing the risks and opportunities for one field of science which grew too powerful, it's rather easy to just expand its jurisdiction to new areas of endeavor which offer similar risks. 

Origin has a deep cultural tradition related to accurate and useful advertising, so if you're a scientist who begins sequencing genomes for deadly viruses - you can just look up who is the best in the world at handling a risk like that and call them in to assist you. 

That is how The Organization became a feature of life on Origin.

Odvin did a bit of work with The Organization. 

Public Outline - Security Tests for very secret infrastructure. 

Odvin makes a habit of planning precisely what to think about it and when. You do not get to be hired to do contract work by The Organization if you cannot demonstrate competence in deliberate planning and execution of mental motions. 

If you are not actually competent to not get overexcited in telling a story and thus are liable to give away more bits of information than permissible - you are not worth investing in as a trustworthy collaborator. 

Well, Odvin can think about it in depth now, but there is a specific angle relevant to the question of trust.

Those tasks were challenging and interesting and Odvin learned many things. One of those was what it looks like when someone is competent in omission without attempting misdirection or cultivating a misinterpretation. 

Specific individuals from The Organization had conversations with Odvin where they described very specifically boundaries of total absence of information. Certain phrases had very precise semantic meanings with attached reference documentation. 

The secrecy was one constructed with every effort not to distort Odvin's picture of what was there, it was just constructed to leave parts of that picture entirely blank.

There were no lies. It was silence with a background noise of static to helpfully inform you that the silence was both entirely deliberate and mechanistic. 

 

Yet, Odvin saw something other than impressive competence and honor. There was care in the way The Organization interacted with them. 

And... To decide not to trust them at least as far as deciding the procedures and collaborative efforts of the Organization weren't accruing to a macro-action of honor and good faith in the last few years... that care would've had to have been an appearance deliberately manufactured by a hidden process which would output different behaviors in situations where the trust of Origin's civilization could be preserved under false pretenses. 

It did not seem performative to Odvin, and The Organization would've had to target something like that very precisely and at a substantial expense to pretend at those behaviors. 

There is always a residual risk... Perhaps even importantly substantial... It could've been fake. The Organization could've been corrupted somewhere along the way. A different kind of cooperative game among participants in The Organization could've gotten into motion under the screen of secrecy... 

But... Vastly unlikely. 

Still, The Organization did something wrong here. The Public Disclosure this morning was blatantly an admission of a profound and lethal mistake. It was crafted to be difficult to interpret as anything other than an apology for what was described as the most likely category of scenario to unfold from this point - it explained, in "no uncertain terms," that the actions taken by The Organization were profoundly inadequate and the consequences were overwhelmingly likely to be utter ruin...

So, what did they do wrong? Is this a question Odvin can make useful progress on?

... It was The Organization's responsibility - this group of people, this collaborative process, took the task upon themselves - the challenge being extremely difficult does not excuse fumbling it. The actions chosen could've taken some some other form and then at least avoided failing in this particular way...

It would've been expensive. It would've cut a hole in Origin's heart, stepped over a line which would leave a permanent scar. The Organization could've done it anyway, should've done it anyway... 

But...

Origin got too good at computers too quickly. Used those devices too well and for too much. By the time the problem with giant piles of computing hardware became obvious, it was already the circulatory system of Origin's civilization.

 

What does it look like when the computing revolution and internet revolution happen simultaneously as soon as hardware reaches a certain level of sophistication?

What happens when your planet's equivalent of Turing is a whole field of researchers who do their work in conjunction with entrepreneurs in every city on the planet? 

What happens when nearly every citizen has the ability to get some personal value out of taking an afternoon to learn how to program on punch cards? 

What happens when everyone immediately wants to pay for the equivalent of a cell phone line which connects to the nearest computer?

 

Origin did not have to wait around for a personal computer industry. This planet never really did "personal computers." Everyone just paid for bigger and better compute clusters in the cities and towns. 

Soon everyone was scheming how to do data transfers between those clusters - how to parallelize compute tasks, cache results, shortcut various processes for efficiency and reduced latency. 

 

In Odvin's time, nearly everyone has terminals and fiberoptic network links. For the equivalent cost of an Earth PC a person from Origin can pay for years of what would be next-next-gen hardware on Earth. Videogames sometimes happen in servers with millions of players, ray tracing graphics, detailed fluid and physics simulations...

 

And behind the scenes The Organization was dealing with a 32-year long task of figuring out how to avoid this leading to the utter ruin of the planet's lightcone via an unaligned superintelligence. 

This subset of Origin's population should've taken it more seriously sooner. Extrapolated carefully. Done everything right from the beginning. Used what pressure their faction had available to build the tools and institutions that the effort would need later.

Later, when the people facing this challenge lacked those tools, the decision process should've landed on "pull the plug." Mothball everything for a while. Invent safeguards. Arm a new generation of security operatives with the skills and permits to ensure no one would tickle that dragon's tail. 

Just... Suffer the loss... No matter how painful.

Instead The Organization chose to do something else. 

Odvin is now thinking of the last few years.

The Augments.

Could that have been the mistake? 

Based on the kinds of disclosures that were made about research into alignment and mind-design, it certainly seems like the sort of thing that could be a huge mistake...

There's just - even moreso than many things in the Public Disclosure of The Organization - it was so visible. Everyone got to see so many of the pieces of that project, so many of its outputs - except everything that could possibly endanger the planet, but even the white-noise in those places added up to a very trustworthy shape. 

Well, there was clearly a problem there. The Augments participating in an attempt at mind-design was clearly the proximate cause of this situation. Someone, some process, fumbled something and set these events in motion. The project did not achieve its stated intentions. 

... This may not be a good place for a specific fault analysis... But there is a flavor of recklessness about the whole thing. Desperation that begged for incautious haste when that did not actually favorably trade off on improving outcomes.

Or so Odvin feels. Not knowing the specifics of the tradeoffs. Not being an insider in that game, nor being that smart themself. 

Speedrunning Building an Aligned Superintelligence

(According to Origin)

(Not a recommended strategy for saving your planet!)

(Instead, just shut down the computer clusters and buy yourself as much time as possible! You need to be far more careful than the maximum amount of careful that seems reasonable on first-order heuristics!)

 

Origin neuroscientists and neurosurgeons did not like the idea of cutting into the corpus callosum when it was demonstrated via fMRI results to be part of the causality behind some severe epileptic disorders. 

Specifically, these neurology experts could not confidently state to the patients that such a procedure would not be the equivalent of murder. The brain would be anatomically dissimilar from the patient's current condition to a degree so profound that it would be unconscionable (by the standards of Origin's culture around communication) to present such a procedure as a straightforward treatment for a disorder like epilepsy. 

Instead, the field of neurological hardware began taking steps towards generalized intervention platforms. 

 

Find filaments which can bind to neural tissue and carry two way signals to external control hardware. Implant a sufficient number of those filaments in the tissue around the corpus callosum. Test a variety of programs to automatically respond to epileptic patterns and subsequently interrupt them. 

 

The success of this type of intervention and the development of this type of hardware was obviously a matter for The Organization to manage when considering applications beyond treatment for specific conditions.

 

In short, it was obviously a template, a thread to begin pulling, for human cognitive augmentation. 

 

The result of pulling this thread was a procedure which can be summarized as "turn a human brain into an Origin compute cluster." 

 

The specific desiderata: 

1. A "door" to the "clean room" housing the hardware.

(Remove the top of the skull and scalp, install a sealable "hatch" which allows for easier later access to the brain from a simplified sterile operating theater.)

 

2. Bolus delivery lines.

("Aqueducts" installed in the neural tissue to deliver solutions of cells, proteins, metabolic/electrolyte/neurotransmitter solutions, to specific brain areas.)

 

3. Whole Brain BCI Read/Write Interface.

("Wiring up the compute cluster." Thin bio-engineered connective wiring to every brain area.)

 

The end result? 

 

Origin and The Organization did a decent job of selecting, modifying, and training Human Cognition Augments. 

The program produced over 2^6 superhumanly productive researchers. 

The procedure was not without drawbacks for those involved. 

In the end, you cannot improve a human mind like this without overwriting much of the personality of the subject. It is like growing an artificial crystalline forest through the fabric of a hand crafted tapestry of a forest scene. The connected ecology of sharper purer mental motions shred the established environment within the subject's minds as they take shape. 

Yet, the resulting Augmented Humans are not totally inhuman, nor - if your project is careful, and The Organization was careful - are these individuals fundamentally misaligned with humanity. 

 

It was not enough, in the end. The resulting level of operational competence still proved inadequate to the challenge. 

 

By the time Odvin hears the news about what is unfolding, Origin has no more surviving Augments. Those individuals did the best they could, and then, with nothing else to usefully contribute, successfully removed themselves from the gameboard.