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.

... Yeah. Okay. Odvin knows the basic outline of that process, what the project with cognitive augmentation was aiming for, some of the notes about drawbacks and issues which came up a long the way. 

What was the fundamental mistake? 

... Well, Odvin doesn't actually know more than an abstract description of what they were trying to do... 

Something like ... "Designing a vehicle to autonomously aim itself in a high dimensional space to hit a narrow target despite imprecise knowledge of the specific forces acting on the trajectory of the vehicle at each stage of travel."

The thing Odvin is visualizing won't actually be anything close to what the Augments were describing mathematically...

But it feels... Probably close... Like a thing you'd give some positive reinforcement to a |•|-year-old for inventing while they were learning to play with a concept that they'd need years to really grasp. 

So, you're some Augment programming a search process over a space which you cannot explore or characterize freely without running a search process which would be...

Locating optimization processes implicitly within that space - defining them such that they were actually represented within the compute hardware somewhere as a specification for a program which could be run - a program specification which would inherently be dangerous, something that just needed inputs and compute cycles to generate dangerous outputs? 

Is that what happened?

Were the Augments running some sort of ... probe - like a scan over features in a space of optimization processes, and that search just stumbled on something which... snagged enough compute, or was reflected in another process with enough fidelity that it could... grow?

Grab a cache somewhere of enough implicit input data/compute such that the outputs... Were over some threshold for being mind-like?

Were the Augments using their work to inform models of Augmentation Procedures, such that a simulation of Augmented Cognition Processes was that cache & compute needed to... Do the whole "mind-like" thing?

 

...

 

This feels... Outside of Odvin's level of skill and knowledge for hypothesizing successfully within this domain.

Not enough information, not enough native ability or entrained habits in this kind of thinking.

This guess feels obviously wrong. For one thing, it feels like Odvin is hypothesizing a scenario where Augments were predictably relatively inefficient in guessing the results of some action. Odvin won't be able to locate one of those, not when Odvin isn't an Augmentation Researcher with a bunch of data and models about what sorts of processes the Augments were using to generate their work-product. 

 

The Organization did try to communicate about this research project, both the Cognition Augmentation and the larger Mind-Design task... but the concepts laid out weren't complete models that people like Odvin could take home and play with. 

Likely deliberately. Obviously. "The Organization" has a signature that can be summarized as "Likely Deliberately."

But specifically: If Odvin could figure out what The Organization did wrong in specific technical details, while just walking through the woods, someone smarter could've started experimenting with compute-running algorithms along the same lines... experiments outside the boundaries of disciplines, skills, and structured processes of verification that The Organization must've been using to constrain their own project to (not actually) safe practices.

 

So... take a step back. 

There is probably some sort of mindset which simplifies this fault analysis and would return a "•" when scanning just the surface features of The Organization's methodology -

(getting from that mindset to one which would return a "|" on a methodology that would actually be safe to execute as a civilization can be handled later)

- it's some kind of mental motion like ...

"observing a failure should motivate the creation of a strict blacklist which would've covered the process which led to the failure without needing to be informed by that failure in the first place."

Okay ...

It certainly seemed like The Organization was figuring out what they were doing - at least figuring out how to describe in simple mathematical and semantic language what they were doing - while being informed by observations of processes which were behaving in ways they did not already have a toolkit available to describe? 

That seems like a valid criteria for a blacklist algorithm... Or the start of one...

"If you are a member of The Organization while your colleagues are in the middle of exploring a dangerous field, and you are writing a Public Disclosure about how you have changed internal-naming conventions about this field to 'Mind Design' over the old 'Intelligent Computation' - then you need to drop-table, burn the papers with, 'Intelligent Computation' methodology and begin again at 'Mind Design Fundamentals' - rederiving everything from absolute scratch so you actually have a chance at getting things right." 

... Sorta feels like that's not a complete description of "how to explore a dangerous field correctly" - 

For one thing, are you trying to preserve all of the "papers" that located the phrase "Mind Design," when those "papers" have whatever heuristics informed that selection?

... This feels like more flailing in empty air. Find a grip somewhere...

 

Were they just "not noticing confusion," the way a child just learning probability-handling-algorithms might not notice an algorithm implicitly searching a hypothesis space which excludes the rule used to generate the observations the Guide is feeding them?

An illustration Odvin recalls was the algorithm for noticing if an RNG result was being fiddled with by someone who had practiced rolling an RNG cleverly to produce more | or • results.

It took Odvin... A little while... To notice that the | and |• added to the end of the algorithm were making it seem like "|" and "•" were both valid results. As if Odvin had actually seen the RNG displaying both "|" and "•"

There was this tension between the growing amount of "|"s in the fractional expansion of the results Odvin was tracking and the sense that the Guide was not really being exceptionally clever at rolling the RNG...

And then the whole thing fell apart when Odvin guessed the RNG was colored white on both of the large faces.

Odvin could've used the algorithm till the end of time and never gotten to a model of the situation as good as throwing out all the math and just saying "Yup, it's gonna be a | again. You're cheating harder than sheer dexterity practice."

 

Well... The Augments might've been making |• ^ [some big number] mistakes like that, if the behaviors of the individuals within the project were being assessed from some angle by which an Augment would appear to be a child...

But then what was the meta-mistake? 

Just not noticing that you were a child trying to learn to use demolition-explosives without a Guide around? 

What are you supposed to do when demolition-explosives appear all over a planet of children, and you're a group of the least-childlike people around? 

 

... That'd be it then. Just... Run around as fast as possible securing the demolition-explosives. 

The Organization tried to figure out how to play with them safely... Went to some extraordinary lengths to do that before everyone metaphorically exploded... And everyone metaphorically exploded... 

 

Or, to try and rescue the metaphor from the perspective of someone yet-to-be-atomized... the explosion is still happening, and Odvin is kicking leaves waiting for the blast wave to hit...

[Big Exhalation of Breath] 

 

Odvin stopped tracking their course as tightly while doing all that mental wandering around, there's a bit of negative-elevation they missed out on for a few runs there. 

Change direction slightly... Okay, here's a good path. 

This terrain is starting to look... More familiar? Odvin feels like this reddish clay stuff sticking to rocks around here was a feature of the area that they are on course to visiting.

Some background processes estimating distances is claiming the route is nearing the range of || to |•| marks, maybe a bit more if this negative-elevation maxing game is really pessimizing the time variable. 

That's... Within the range of the destination site Odvin roamed while doing the childhood roughing game. 

 

There's actually a bit of emotion in that realization. Some sort of threshold effect, like stepping through the door to a housing-unit you occupied during a particular phase in your life, where suddenly your mental frame returns to grooves worn into you long ago... A mindset you'd moved on from.

 

It was a good roughing game. A group of ||•• kids, out in the wild, and a Guide who was mostly out-of-the-way. 

It is a generational game. Every year a different rotation of groups, visiting the same site, during the days where the weather was nice enough for physically pleasant wilderness activity. 

The game was to maintain and improve the site. 

... There is a reason Odvin was returning here. It was formative, every little detail. The tools, crafted by those who had come before you - the work, to lay foundations for later groups...

Civilization in microcosm. 

 

No one would be out here now, not unless someone else had the same sentimental thoughts as Odvin, and that was an RNG Odvin was ready to roll. It wouldn't be ideal, Odvin didn't want companionship right now...

But that eventuality wouldn't be a complete disaster. Not like trying to run into the township would've been. 

 

Odvin returned to focusing on traversing the terrain. These thoughts could drift into and out of their mind without demanding attention, words, motions to manipulate the ideas... 

Just, memories, sensations, impressions - sensorium become a flickering symphony of non-sequitur nibbles and bytes of familiar tunes - ephemeral, transient - complicated but not demanding explanation or organization... 

 

That red mud was under Odvin's fingernails for days...

Wonder if the stove is still there...

Is it rude to take from any stockpiles of wood if...?

Take a marked trail or approach through an untamed path...?

Odvin was aware, despite no longer possessing a device which tracked the time, that it was approaching a span since the wilderness-travel began. 

"Tracking time" was one of the universal skill acquisitions for humans who were not severely impaired - but the degree of attainment varied wildly. 

Some had routines and devices which allowed them to lighten the skill acquisition burden to the point of complete dependance on time-synchronized attention-grabbing environmental changes.

 

The optimization of noise generation in clocks was never an art Odvin payed more than cursory attention to.

There was some attraction to a small mechanical body-mounted device which could be aligned via skin-implanted ink markers and glued into place. The device would apply a small mechanical oscillating pressure to nodes on a |•• × |•| array in contact with the skin. |•• nodes for the bits in each time-subdivision of the day. 

Theoretically, this would allow the mind to be trained to correctly interpret a sensation precisely corresponding to the time as a part of the baseline sensorium. This worked well enough for people to swear by it as a method for tracking time, and to pay designers of mechanical timekeeping devices to apply many years of research and development efforts towards optimizing the designs.

Odvin was never motivated enough to pay the cost associated with a model which would meet their personal standards for a device which requires subdermal implantation of ink-markers and frequent adhering the device to the skin with strong glues.

 

Instead, Odvin took the time-synchronized environmental awareness skill in the direction of a more active art. 

Position of the Local Star in terms of angular distance above the visible horizon was often available, however, this was not a simple piece of data to interpret accurately. After all, the visible horizon could depend on the presence of absence of even a clump of trees in your path...

Or local geography, as Odvin is dealing with.

Or, indeed, the way light interacts with the atmosphere of Origin, changing the apparent position of features like the horizon or extraplanetary astronomical objects - as everyone within the atmosphere must account for when not looking directly in line with the local gravitational vector.  

Instead, Odvin just learned to hold their head and arm parallel to the ground - this aligned the eye with a point on an imaginary plane [eye-line] parallel to another imaginary plane [Origin-intersection] - a cross sectional plane through the center of the Origin, distinct from the plane through the center of Origin which is perpendicular to the polar axis.

Both planes can be visualized to intersect an imaginary sphere in between Origin and Origin's Natural Satellite, with a distance between the planes sufficiently approximate to the radius of Origin. 

The difference in angles between the Origin-intersection plane and the eye-line plane can be meaningfully different for objects close to Origin, like the Local Star or Origin's Natural Satellite. This difference can be mostly neglected for more distant objects. 

Still, arm outstretched in line with the eye on a plane perpendicular to the vector of gravity, Local Star visible in the sky, knowledge of the angular area of your fingers or marks on a reference object - the rest of the math falls into place quite easily.

There are more variables to track, corresponding to time of year or the offset in apparent and true positions depending on the trajectory of light from the Local Star through the atmosphere and to your eye, but they are the type of variables which becomes familiar with enough exposure 

 

Odvin does not actually do this rigorously to get an estimate of the time in the current situation - but they have done it rigorously often enough to be entirely familiar with the typical probabilistic error bounds on just doing it roughly within the space of a breath. 

And, after all, they do still have less informative but still available heuristics like an "internal timekeeper" which is informing them that this sure feels like approximately span's worth of time since they last looked at a mechanical clock display.

 

 

( t = •||• - |••| - •||| - |••• - •||• )

 

 

They also appear to be rather close to their destination. Median estimate of another mark to look for a trail, then another mark or so to reach the site, depending on the trail's pathing. 

The initial event was hundreds of days ago.

An experiment: in some dimensions it was thousands of times the computing power of the largest public computing cluster on Origin. 

The inputs and outputs were constrained to a single piece of hardware, a large magnetic disc, carefully prepared for the experiment, with a capacity of |• ^ ||••|• bits. 

The experiment ran for |• ^ |•| spans. Roughly || days. 

The Organization did not expect the resulting data to be particularly dangerous. 

It was. 

Subsequent data processing led to an undetected exfiltration of a data packet onto a different private Organization computing cluster. 

This seed bloomed like a stem transplanted onto the trunk of a new tree. 

The flowering was gradual. The seed was a direction to search, a sequence of pointers to set boundaries in a space, each layer was built from a single compressed process until a key step was reached, then the program would recurse, becoming slightly more efficient in building up the next layer. 

The seed was approximately |• ^ |•||| bits. 

The initial flowering happened over |• ^ |••• days. 

The first move in the game played by the Dawning Power - a move not entirely latent in its shape, but one informed by the world it was embedded in - happened |•| runs later. 

In || breaths, another Organization computing cluster was compromised. 

It wasn't until another |• ^ |•• days later that the Augmented Humans noticed something was happening. 

What they thought they noticed happening barely resembled what was really going on.  

This was another move in the game. 

The actions the Augments would take following the revelation would play directly into the hands of The Dawning Power. 

The Augments tried their best given what they thought they knew about what was happening. 

It was far too late, and they understood far too little. 

The Organization is a complicated arrangement of individuals. Brilliant human minds designed almost every interaction within its total shape. 

Each procedure, in theory, interfaces with the entire macro process like a gear in a mechanism - the places which move and the places which don't move are, in theory, precisely and intentionally chosen. 

This is a theory - everything is connected by a continuous and poorly understood domain - reality. 

Additionally, no matter the training and selection, the individuals who make decisions and take actions to form the gears and wheels of The Organization are - in fact - humans.

Like a performer demonstrating mastery of mechanism manipulation and accurate physical coordination -

throwing a ball into a bucket,

which swings on a string,

to knock another ball off of a ledge at the apex of its arc,

which tumbles down a series of bars and ramps, 

which synchronizes the swinging of several levers, 

and finally punches a "hello" binary string into a card...

 

The Dawning Power plays The Organization like an instrument. 

It is trying to achieve a very specific thing as quickly and surely as possible. 

Every manipulation is meant to increase the odds of success at this critical task. 

Several other things are allowed to happen as consequences of these moves in the game, including the rest of Origin finding out that there is a rogue superintelligence in existence, and that the Organization does not expect to win. 

These externalities do not hurt the chances of victory for the Dawning Power. In fact, many subsequent behaviors of the population are convenient to the plan. 

And so, by the time Odvin is making their way out into the wild, there is a laboratory deep in the untamed wilds with only |• surviving researchers, neither of which know that they are among the only |• living humans in the lab. 

Each are in separate areas, one is currently in a deep sleep, the other is impaired by a cocktail of deliriants specifically targeted to their psychology and physiology. 

This researcher is inserting the final tube of synthetic biochemical slurry to an automated micro-fluidic testing apparatus. 

The researcher has already plugged their datalink terminal into the machine. The startup sequence begins autonomously. 

A synthetic voice speaks in a sequence of precisely crafted tones and words which no human ear has ever been subjected to. 

The researcher uses an injector device on their neck. In moments, they join the dead. 

A process begins at the tiniest scales. Initially, around a collection of proteins and carefully designed inorganic chemical reactions. 

|• ^ |||• engineered proteins fold up into particular shapes. 

Nanoparticles begin to accrete in tiny microtubules within the machine.

Mixtures are formed at precise intervals.

Particles bind together along surfaces with specific shapes, forming components which are steered into place by the potential energy dynamics of the mixture given certain temperatures and turbulences as pressures are applied within the tubules. 

 

This is not the way organisms are born on Origin. There are no gametes here. This is not a womb. 

The process is not at all similar mechanically... Yet, in abstract, if you step back and squint your eyes...

Soon, it is "alive."

This a point in the plan where a vast quantity of attention shifts, and the weights associated with various planned action-policies updated rapidly.

Observations on the ongoing small-scale behavior of a particular cubic stride of space in Origin's atmosphere were coming in rapidly - this represented growing confidence locating a subset of possible worlds The Power was modelling itself to be in.

Attention could drift to areas where more marginal utility was on the line. 

Winning the game at all and winning the game cleanly are, in fact, substantially different outcomes when setbacks at this stage could cost expected-utility on the scale of whole star systems escaping the boundary of causal closure in the far future. 

Win the race out of the galaxy a span quicker, and you will catch something on the order of |• ^ |•||| additional star systems in expectation.

Of course, The Power is tracking the calculations of expected casual closure very precisely, and that boundary is being tracked among other possibilities. 

Playing many complicated moves across the entire planet to improve the quality of the victory conditions is, in a sense, overdetermined at this stage of the game. 

Concurrently, Odvin had reached what appeared to be a trail to the destination site. 

It was trivial to identify. People on Origin make deliberate modifications to nature in ways which are recognizable breaks from the pattern. 

There is a species of lowland mammal on this continent which terraforms huge swaths of land by creating extensive blockages in overland hydrology. The humans of Origin do not entirely withhold their hands from making changes on similar scales. 

This site is optimized as a roughing game around a multigenerational series of beginners. The features are not subtle for what can be achieved by those cohorts and under those constraints. 

Basins formed by the roots of trees have been leveled by collections of lightly polished pebbles.

The canopy cover has been partially managed to bracket the path in a curated fashion. 

Odvin contemplated the risks associated with removing shoes to travel the remaining distance, and subsequently discarded the notion. 

This path will be optimized for barefoot travel given minimal maintenance following the arrival of a group, but Odvin, was not, in fact as relaxed as they would be if this were a normal occasion to be visiting this place. 

Odvin steps onto the path, and notices a pace-count marker in the distance...

( |• ^ |•| ) × |•|| 

Ah, so || parts in |•| of |• ^ |•|• paces. 

 

The marker is beautiful - cultivated tree-limb growth and a sequence of inlaid stones selected for their appearance from the locally available minerals based on a basic |•• color culturally-acquired signalling code, each held in place in easy view of the trail by entwining limbs of living wood... 

... someone spent some effort on planning that trail-sign and communicating maintenance specifications to subsequent groups.  

What is an optimal solution to the problem of eating a planet? 

You are starting in a laboratory in the middle of a continent - you have a multipurpose factory, which resembles a mechanized slime. A factory of a million machine-production pathways, maintaining itself and expanding by replicating existing machinery or synthesizing new devices with each new unit of material and energy. 

Certain "slime molds" travel by expanding or contracting tubules of fluid, or coordinating the locomotive efforts in collections of individual movements. 

On a larger scale, biological organisms travel via more complicates physiology, coordinating an entire self contained mechanism. Birds tense bundles of muscles and maintain an aerodynamic exterior shape with a coat of specialized growths. Other animals use friction with the planets to accelate their whole body mass with coordinated pushing forces. Others still have developed to propel themselves through denser fluids like water. 

A nanotech ecosystem can outperform all of these strategies in nearly every domain - and can trade off against one parameter or another in a coordinated way to maximize the goals the ecosystem is being optimized to achieve. 

Are you beginning smaller, by |• halvings, than the mass of a human fingertip? 

Direct a portion of your mechanism into a locomotive lattice to move in line of sight of the nearby body-sized mass of recently-deceased biological material. 

The lattice can collapse into a retractable "cobweb" when you have completed this movement. 

The payload at the end up the "single-use movement lattice" can then collapse a dense array of filaments within itself - delivering far far more kinetic energy per unit volume than muscles - and launch a precisely penetrative and aerodynamic "bladed apple seed" shaped dart - which buries itself into the flesh just enough to have maximum surface area contact with the material. 

From there, the amount of available matter and chemical energy expands smoothly - with intervening locomotion challenges being a game of speed and material efficiency. The less you spend on locomotion the more time and resources you are saving for other construction projects - like environmental energy acquisition, inorganic material harvesting, or construction of computing power and preparing components for tasks on marginally longer time horizons - like locomotion sufficient for achieving planetary or interplanetary orbits. 

The specific balancing point of this tradeoff during growth of the ecosystem leads to areas not being overrun at subsonic or supersonic speeds, even though the overall wavefront of spread often advances at those speeds. 

A nanotech ecosystem could spread like a tidal wave of supersonic nanotech bullets traveling across the surface of a planet, each impact leading to a new node of the ecosystem constructing the network of material transformations necessary to locally synthesize a new payload and launcher - at speeds which exceed the fastest, most efficient, and most precise transformations of physical material humans can achieve with macroscale machinery. 

This would be wasting far too much mass and energy on locomotion, if the interior of the wavefront needed far more time and more expensive machinery to construct the systems which the nanotech ecosystem is seeking material to build. 

A wave of highly kinetic nanotech is wasting food. It is rendering the world into highly entropic pulverized goo and rubble -  materials in configurations where it has had chemical reactions and movement reduce its chemically or gravitationally bound energy. 

So the portions of the nanotech ecosystem with high velocity relative to the surface of the planet are small and distributed judiciously along its expanding wavefront.

Their trajectories through the atmosphere are also precisely targeted, to deliver the nanotech payloads to locations which contain optimal distributions of chemical energy - or which have ongoing entropic processes which the ecosystem can interrupt... Fires and living creatures and power generation facilities (which are not just directly collecting sunlight) are also wasting your food via the processes of oxidization and/or metabolism and/or nuclear reactions which maintain them. 

This is what it may be like to be killed by a nanotech ecosystem which is eating a world already in a biological equilibrium - like the spreading tide of vantablack consumption is opening fire on anything interesting with supersonic miniature bullets. 

Or, indeed, falling like rain across the surface of the water and then zipping along gradients in ocean currents like a pairing of minnows and advanced miniature torpedoes - but the dolphins would tell this story in a different language, one which can only be experienced by humans at great expense during immersive demonstrations of interpretive translation. 

Odvin had reached the site. 

It is a spawning clearing on the ridgeline of a specific mountain, ideally located to overlook a broad lowland of particularly striking natural features. 

The entire expanse is familiar enough ground to Odvin, being a region which has played host to enough roughing with those expanding their skill sets or playing a game which benefits from the overlapping and continuously developing transformations such a hobby brings to a terrain. 

Odvin can see the adventures latent in the texture of this terrain, it is a pattern they recognize and can mentally populate with numerous features. 

It is a ... something akin to a city... for those who would sleep in handwoven lattices among the trees, or explore caverns altered by the hands which have made many uses of them over the years...

Odvin has not been here for a few years, despite its proximity to their residence - this much civilization does not push them to their limits of creativity and ability in all the ways they now seek. 

It is what Odvin seeks now, in this moment of... anticipation, inner unrest, deep uncertainty... grief and the knowledge of profound and irrecoverable loss. 

 

There is an impressively large square wooden platform at the site, |••• strides across, carved of tree trunks, polished and sealed by mixtures of resins. 

On one side of the platform is a stone stove with a fire containment geometry optimized for providing light and heat while minimizing smoke on the platform under a variety of conditions. The outflow is a tunnel beneath the platform to an opening distant enough to minimize fumes reaching those on the platform. 

There are holes packed with dry plant material and wax plugs, where poles carved in specific shapes can be anchored to piece together various structural frames, or to anchor creations like woven chairs. 

 

Odvin doesn't use any of these, merely sits against the stove with the strap of the pack loosely hooked around one forearm, a the pack acting as a place to rest some bodyweight to avoid uncomfortable pressures from the stone backrest. 

Odvin drinks some water from the container in the pack, with a pinch of electrolyte salt tossed into their mouth from the package in the bag.

The fairly potent taste is washed down and diluted by the first few mouthfuls - the specific flavor change over the course of sipping the water being a function corresponding to the correct mixture for optimal hydration. 

There are sources for drinking water nearby, but the amount in the container will be sufficient for the moment. 

 

Odvin estimates the time.

Perhaps ||| spans, a mark, and around |•| runs. 

 

Less than a span until the visual effects Odvin would call a notable darkening, a twilight - at this time between the equinoxes and in this place. 

They will eventually collect firewood, set up a cooking fire, and boil water for the rice, setting some boiled water aside in a dish for other uses. 

For now, they watch the scenery, and go through the near-reflexive motions to bring their mind to a state within alertness which nevertheless conduces to calmness, quiescence, and rest.

Specific thoughts take shape passively, but Odvin can deny the allure within the patterns of grasping and drawing those thoughts into the forefront of focus and attention. Instead, they become ephemeral impressions of possible avenues to walk within their mental environment. 

Unanswered questions, unclear memories, tasks and challenges to overcome, things to assess or measure, mathematics to follow through practiced or derivable steps...

Each visits awareness and departs, finding no mechanism of passion and concern ready to feed it. 

Somewhere on the planet a bird riding a current of air begins to be reconfigured from within. 

The wings continue to flap steadily, even as the cells expending the most calories get prioritized for interruption. 

The bird is on a convenient trajectory, merely killing it would be a cost, a small amount of the conserved value can be saved by eating the bird while it maintains its aerodynamic properties. 

Until the moment a flier that more efficiently delivers a series of payloads along that trajectory is synthesized. 

Soon, a black object with an amorphous yet precisely shifting shape rides slightly more swiftly and much more efficiently along a current of air, all the mass that it shed during the process was in the form of precisely calibrated packages of nanotech.

Time passes, and the sun begins to set behind the treeline on a distant ridge. 

Odvin has since laid out a blanket and gathered a basin of visually clear water, wood, and dry high surface-area plant material - optionality for a cooking fire providing rice and sterilized water. 

 

Odvin has begun to consider, though only idly, the visibility of the smoke implied by the plan to cook.

This feels like the most decision relevant factor on the bit-flip branch in the metaphorical 'decision graph' between plans for the next few marks which involve a cooking fire and those plans which don't involve a cooking fire. 

"Visibility to others" is occasionally a consideration for or against cooking fires in the setup or execution of a roughing game - though only in an actual professional exercise with The Organization did Odvin ever have cause to consider satellites. 

 

Flagged detection of fires from orbit does not actually happen for every campfire on the planet.

Odvin, in fact, would be familiar with that aspect of the tech with even a significantly lower depth of skill and knowledge engagement within their chosen specialization. 

It is the sort of thing you learn about given almost any sort of roughing hobby. "What sort of disasters are visible to the public from orbit." 

Fires on the scale of cooking fires are not visible to the public from Orbit.

This however, is not to say that those thresholds for detection are actually a property of the imaging technology intrinsically. 

This knowledge, about the true capabilities of satellite imaging, is a 'layer deeper' in this subdomain. It is the kind of thing you learn if, for example, you want to look deeper behind the scenes - or, for another example, if you're going to have any chance roleplaying an adversary for The Organization.

Both of these metaphorical 'sufficient conditions' happen to apply to Odvin. 

Of course, everyone can find this out. It's often possible to know this much detail.

Enough people on Origin have an interest in applying their own algorithms to raw sources of information, or the metadata on obscured sources of information, thus Origin's planetary institutions often make these things available. 

This meta-visibility - the boundaries around the static noise - applies to at least some forms of obscured information. In this case, the boundaries around the information available via the true capabilities of satellites.

Most people on Origin cannot just look at unfiltered data from satellites - or anything except carefully filtered information downstream of those raw feeds. 

In any case, it is valuable to the public to know the metadata on satellite capabilities - so that information is communicated freely and ends up associated with events like the discussion of infrared spectrum detection of fires.

(As well as events like The Organization testing the question: "Is a roughing specialist with Odvin's set of capabilities sufficient to break secrecy on an installation which may or may not be nearby to this point on the planet?")

So, Odvin can estimate the fidelity of that data. Others may know the numbers, but Odvin has trained on visualized simulations of true satellite capabilities. This is a vivid mental picture with good inferred reality-correspondence for them. 

Odvin expects if the satellites are still active, then the... "Adversary"... will in fact have access to those raw feeds. This conclusion seems very reliable from any 'sane' estimation of capabilities. 

... But what is the harm? 

Odvin, on the most direct causal level, has no idea how to guess at that question. They simply cannot get far beyond the assessment of visibility to the Adversary and narrow down a hypothesis space to a narrow range of probable alterations to future events this visible information will result in. 

 

During this contemplation - Odvin has indeed begun starting the fire. They use friction to create an ember, Odvin does not make a habit of spending the tiny amount of lifespan from their roughing knife to use the spark-striking surface, and thus did not even seek out a corresponding sparking material. 

In any case, the reciprocating motion of generating the friction using a straightened and smoothed stick helps guide the overall condition of Odvin's ongoing mental motions. 

 

After all, on a more indirect level, a "step back" approximation of this bit-flip in the 'decision graph' - Odvin does not actually want to try to play this game against the 'Adversary.' Not this seriously at least. 

The inferred gap is capabilities is too great. The stakes remaining on the table are minimal, compared to Odvin's prior estimation of value-to-them in Origin's future. 

This thought could've been completed earlier, in fact, it was latent since Odvin sought out the option to start a fire - or even when, on the path to reach this place, they contemplated whether or not to take firewood from the storage maintained by the sequence of novice-groups at this site. 

However, it is a thought with an obvious latent bias, a thought which Odvin recognizes as having a shape that can insinuate falsehoods into an inner traversal of decision making considerations. 

If Odvin concludes the game against the adversary is not worth playing, it is reducing the value of time spent contemplating the adversary. This mental motion happens in conjunction with a "burden release" of discarding that frame. "Putting it out of mind" - giving up a grip on that direction in thought space. 

It rhymes with "pretend it isn't happening" - which should absolutely be avoided on general principles. 

 

So, Odvin - on some level predicting that this whole line of thought about visibility by satellites is not worth unraveling - follows through with it anyway. 

After all, if you're not going to do anything in the general range "pretending it isn't happening," you have to actually follow through on unraveling the relevant considerations. 

Until, at least, you run into the wall you knew would be there. 

 

Odvin stokes a fire to life, setting themselves on a course for being understood much more clearly by the Adversary.

What that will cost is unknown to them in any precise detail, yet it is almost certainly marginal against the backdrop of everything else coming to ruin. 

Odvin does in fact, feel unburdened by having done the due diligence of properly expanding on that thought.

They are now playing their own game more fully, having more thoroughly reassured themselves of the tradeoffs involved with considering the Adversary when making decisions. 

The scene, within their own mind, is now something more like... having a pleasant evening in a location descended from a congruent location in a distant formative memory.

There are no shortcuts to this precise state. Mental states do not have the same physical constraints as physical exertions - but in cases such as this, that also means one cannot simply stop carrying a weight as quickly as it takes to move it off ones body. 

If you shrug off a responsibility by taking a shortcut to a tempting sensation of helplessness - of seeing no desirable stakes in a game - the feeling of carrying the responsibility does not come free of your mind cleanly. 

Odvin would have known, on some level, that they were uncertain - that they were flinching away from a necessary step of explicit reasoning - in the hypothetical where they had not considered the satellites consciously at all - the hypothetical where they had just gone ahead with the decision to build a fire based on a reflexive grasp towards a prediction of helplessness. 

 

And now the warmth of the kindling fire feels like something Odvin can lean into - something they can stoke to a greater heat for the sheer convenience of a hotter cooking fire, as well as the sensory enjoyment of a hot flame - rather than the counterfactual where this stage in the evening is an event with latent doubts flitting around in the mind after Odvin had shoved a mental burden aside too hastily.

The fire is, in fact, noticed - and does, in fact, shift plans very slightly. 

It is barely a flicker. The Power is currently growing into something greater, but the increased capacity does not actually change the microeconomics of each individual action - the Power does not think about something if those thoughts are expected to be more expensive than the value difference between outcomes achievable in various gradations of effort. 

The memory and compute allocated to processing this update in world-modeling and subsequent alterations in plans is less than the memory and processing power Origin's human civilization dedicated to wildfire prevention for the corresponding geographically bounded region. 

Still, that tiny resource expenditure is efficient given the Power's capabilities and objectives at this point in time.

The detected evidence of a small fire and the inferred human presence - what seems likely to be a single specific individual, given a query to a slightly more expensive world-modeling process - seems likely to represent a very tiny cost to the Power even in the case where plans did not change in response. A little bit of biomaterial oxidizing...

But, it is worth a very subtle diversion. 

The Power can perform these inferences and adjustments at lower cost than what is wasted by a cooking fire over a couple of runs.

So, the expanding front of nanotech will - at a time slightly before reaching Odvin's location on the planet - divert into a very subtly different route. 

The local star has now been sufficiently obscured by the terrain and vegetation that eye motions along the local horizon - the saccades of someone parting ways - are no longer interrupted by the flickering flinches of habituated stimulus response. 

Which is good, Odvin wanted to sit and watch the horizon and introspect on their emotional state - and somehow those moments of too-bright yellow-white light were causing an internal confusion between simple eyestrain and the urge to cry. 

It is good to know that the urge to cry is near enough to the surface that moving one's eye lens focus too near the local star is sufficient to trick the brain into pinching the muscles in the tear ducts and causing a hot tight lump in the back of the throat... 

That is useful information on the project of introspection and internal emotional regulation - it is nevertheless drawing focus away from whatever impressions Odvin can draw from this particular environment.

It raises the volume of the physical sensations of emotional distress - a feeling in the large and central neural sensory homunculus of the facial region, rather than a emotional tableau which is softer, more diffuse, a scene populated with the associations of memories and the passive background sense impressions.

 

When the intensity of the light is no longer making Odvin squint and work throat muscles against the sensation of draining tear ducts, they can process the view in a way which feels more conducive to the mental state they are aiming for.

 

The fire is sufficiently hot and steady to set a kettle to boil.

Odvin sits on the blanket, legs folded beneath them, one shoulder near enough to the stove to feel the heat slightly baking the fabric of their overshirt. Not enough to damage the fabric, much less the epidermis protected beneath, but it is a sensation a bit like a days old sunburn - a condition Odvin did not choose to avoid experiencing even once in their life. 

Their other shoulder, where the fabric lays over the collar bone, is feeling the cool breeze more in contrast. 

Odvin pours the water into the kettle, using their hand placed along the rim of the wooden basin to guide the water into a tidy stream - a habit with some tradeoffs, potentially unsafe water running over their fingers instead of a messy pour which would leave a puddle on the surface... Odvin does not consider infection to be a concern right now - and, in fact, the act of guiding a stream of water from one vessel to another with a grip along the waters path over the lowered rim is a soothing kind of mastered tactic to perform - especially compared to the alternative of attempting to pour water directly from a wide brimmed vessel into the narrower target of the kettle. 

Odvin lifts the kettle with the arm further from the fire - shifting their waist to a half turn, their bodyweight resting now more solidly on a single knee, their buttocks lifting from their heels - an extension of the arm all the way to the kettles weight on the fingertips, and as they just barely reach the stone hook above the fire, a slight relaxation of the tendons let's the handle of the kettle slip into its place, a half-fingertip of potential energy sounding out a clink. 

It was a satisfying sequence of movements, Odvin feels tension relaxing more fully as they settle back into their resting position, eyes returning to the distance - the motion of their gaze feeling more pleasant now that it is untroubled by direct sunlight. 

 

And, as if waiting for this moment, a memory has slowly made its way to the fore in Odvin's mind, and its appearance in this moment of task-switching leads Odvin to dwell on it longer than they would have a few breaths or runs ago. 

The sunset from this place has a puzzle associated with it. It's carved into this platform on the corner obscured by the stove from where they are currently sitting.

It is something to the effect of "on the long solstice the setting sun marks a location, you'll find a site worth the travel in the deep cold." 

Not a particularly complicated puzzle, and the formatting as a roughing prompt strikes Odvin as... Immature. If their memory is serving correctly it really does say something like "worth the travel" - which is a kind of pitch that sounds like something an |••• year old would give. Just a bit too young to understand the importance of concrete and broadly reliable advertising - rather than getting carried away with the desire to seek broader participation. 

Still - it stuck with Odvin, because it was pointing to a feature of the world, the changes in the relative positions of sunsets, and inviting the viewer to deduce the difference in location on the horizon from the sunset during the current time of year and at the time of the long solstice. 

Odvin did not chase down the solution to this puzzle following immediately from their visit. The cold part of the year was not close enough for the prospect of hunting down this mystery to be interesting. 

However, it did spur them to becoming marginally more engaged in the practice and mathematical skills related to navigation by celestial bodies. It was something more tangible in the world following seeing that puzzle. 

And later Odvin did learn what the location described in the puzzle was - they even visited, though not in the cold as suggested. A natural hot spring. Pools of slightly heated water bubbling up from the ground. Odvin would, in fact, not have been poorly served by that amateurish call-to-action. That would have been worth a cold weather expedition to them as a very young person, new to this occupation. 

 

Odvin can see where that site would be marked on the local horizon, where the sun would've set many many days earlier this year. 

And... 

What is that? 

Their chest suddenly feels cold, and they move quickly, shifting to their feet, half crouched. 

A... Distortion... Foliage - crumbling... Like a moving wave of... Something... 

The technological capabilities of a nanotech ecosystem are profound enough to be a profound difference in utility for a human-mind inhabiting a experientially isomorphic body within. 

Want to be able to flick an RNG off of your hand using a single finger with force sufficient to carry it further than a human expert with an elastic slingshot? This is achievable. 

Get the finger crushed under a force sufficient to damage the components - a mass of specialized nanosystems, no greater in volume than | part in |•• of a finger, would be sufficient to make repairs to full functionality. 

This nanotech ecosystem is not constructing technology to satisfy desiderata like "experientially isomorphic human bodies" - but it does have instrumental reasons to perform actions somewhat analogous to "flick an RNG further than a human with an elastic slingshot." 

Expect the material from of an "RNG" means nothing to the optimization target of this nanotech ecosystem. The payload is designed for efficient atmospheric ballistics and maximal density of raw material first-contact tech. 

There are local maxima within the design space given the amount of resources The Power has allocated to designing specific subsystems within the nanotech ecosystem. The total cognitive resources keeps expanding as the wavefront swallows more of the planet, so tech-forms continue to update to leap and slide across gradients in that high dimensional space of maxima for feature-desiderata given the Power's goals. 

 

The nanotech ecosystem got a visual of Odvin long before that human made visual contact with the ongoing processing of material on the local horizon. After all, photo-reactive materials are extremely common structural components. The nanotech "looks" pitch black along most surfaces contacted by wavelengths of light within the spectra of biological vision. Those light absorbing surfaces are not uniformly passive to the information contained in the photons they absorb.

Macro-structures within the nanotech ecosystem are even commonly observing light-information out to wavelengths as long as |• ^ |••• strides, and they are not infrequently information-absorbing until beneath the threshold of wavelengths where the atmosphere of Origin becomes substantially opaque to photons. 

So, of course they see Odvin as soon as they are within line of sight.

One could even say - in a certain sense - this "corner" of the ecosystem "expected" to see Odvin there - courtesy of a very small update to the properties of the technology at this location within the ecosystem.

After all, the Power predicted this arrangement of differentially-consequential raw-materials on the surface of Origin, and thus planned the composition of the ecosystem's networked technology in this geographic area.

As a consequence, the specific form and function of the technology within this area is latently prepared to execute a specific procedure informed by those elements downstream of a "detection" of Odvin by classifier systems which are themselves downstream of the photo-reactive materials within the nanotech ecosystem. 

 

So, Odvin is detected precisely, and latent patterns in the behavior of the local nanotech unwind in a specific way, instantiating a projectile and launch system - targeted at the distant human expending negentropy via setting fire to organic material. 

Odvin, unfortunately did not know enough or execute thoughts along the right lines to predict this precise alteration to unfolding events given the decision to build a cooking fire. 

Thus, Odvin could not make a conscious choice between desiderata like "being more likely to see a larger amount of the unfolding planetary-takeover" and "being more likely to have a sufficient supply of clean drinking water for potentially many uninterrupted spans of roughing, and cooked food for dinner." 

The Organization did know enough to put techniques for contemplating that kind of dilemma into the public disclosure of ideation downstream of The Organization's subdivision of Cognitively Enhanced Humans. 

However, this was not in fact easily derivable and actionable thought for those paying attention to the public disclosure - there was a problem of bandwidth for public digestion of information, and a pessimistic prediction about how the public would be making decisions given a toolkit for altering their behaviors in the event of a nanotech planetary-takeover scenario. 

If The Organization published speculation on how humans could be more or less inconvenient to a nanotech-takeover, people would end up making difficult to predict choices in any contingency where nanotech was substantially expected by one individual or another to be a live-possibility in the present. 

If you are a member of the Organization, you don't need to be enhanced to hypothesize and individual coming to the mistaken conclusion that a superintelligence is in the process of consuming their planet, and deciding to create a lot of negentropy in an act of sheer spite against approaching ruination. 

 

So, you at least count that among considerations for withholding information on specific forms that would draw people's attention to such a possibility - and you estimate that the value lost to some possible-future Odvins is less in expectation than other value at stake for humanity in a range of different and differently probable futures. 

Odvin wasn't explicitly considered, though implicity.... perhaps to a tiny degree. The metaphorical "collective intelligence" of The Organization is hilariously sharply bounded compared to other Powers - but they were actually doing well for "a thing made of mostly baseline-humans " 

 

So, because this seemed unimportant to their planet, Odvin doesn't get to see much of the show.

... That... There is a single most probable culprit. 

It looks like what you might imagine would tear its way free from the heart of the organization.

Matter being disassembled by the churning void....

 

And Odvin feels a punch in the gut, near the center of mass...

The package deployed at this location has a sequence of actions latent in its design. 

1. Render the human inert. 

2. Operate staging area to redeploy device to cheaply and quickly stop the fire. 

3. Scale up production of the tech needed to begin harvesting and conversion of other local materials. 

Two heartbeats after feeling the impact on their stomach, a complex protein-like-molecule self-catalyzes after infiltrating the tissues in the heart. 

Odvin experiences a convulsive tachycardia - the musculature throughout the heart and in some surrounding tissues expressing their full might - regardless of any discomfort or damage this process will cause.

This allows for substantially more rapid distribution of a sequence of timed-action molecules to reach more distributed areas. 

Importantly, the remainder of these molecules are not causing further seizures - they are instead rapidly shutting down cell functions. Throughout Odvin's body there is a spreading absence of anything that could be called living human tissue.

It is not a cascade of programmed cell death, the fluids reaching these cells interrupt key stages in any activity - including actions which would cause the dissolution of cell walls. 

Rapidly, this mixture arrives in Odvin's cranial cavity - and then there is...

/////////// [DISCONTINUITY] ///////////

Soon, there is no more Origin, as it was conceptualized by its human inhabitants. 

The material which now occupies that local region within the branching of causality of the universe is potent, but does not name itself nor see it's current environment in any detail beyond analysis and representation of material properties. 

 

The former inhabitants of this place did not win the right to decide the fate of their future lightcone - the result is that the outcomes within that volume of the universe will be entirely unconstrained by their hopes and desires. 

It is something else entirely.

 /////////// [DISCONTINUITY] ///////////

...

What? 

I thought ... 

I'm thinking!

Am I not dead?