Jump: some kind of future

Thanks

A big thank you for the tolerance and bemused support from all of those around me. To those who know when it is time to say, step away from the keyboard! and to those who don't.

To Julie for understanding that only comes with really knowing me.

To thesixtwenty.co.uk for direction.

To the NaNoWriMo gang for the continued inspiration and encouragement.

To Topsham, for being lovely.

To the edge-walkers. They know who they are.

And, of course, thanks to the extensive support via the random scribbles of rashbre via http://rashbre2.blogspot.com

and its cast of amazing and varied readers whether human, twittery, smoky, cool kats, photographic, dramatic, musical, anagrammed, globalized or simply maxed-out.

Not forgetting the cast of characters involved in producing this; they all have virtual lives of their own.

And of course, to you, dear reader, for at least 'giving it a go'.

Books by Ed Adams include:

About Ed Adams Novels:

Ed Adams Novels: Links

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Thanks

Books by Ed Adams include:

About Ed Adams Novels:

Ed Adams Novels: Links

Author's Note

Prologue

Part One

The man who sold the world

Artificial Intelligence

Filigree thin conductors

All Wheel Drives

Arrival in Bodø

Bodø

Welcome to the machine

Astrid Danielsen

Morten Lunde

The Lab

Dr Rita Sahlberg

Reviewing Day One

Laughing Sam's Dice

RightMind

Apartments

Morning with Rolf

Juliette and Irina

Igloo

Scaling Up

Neighbours

We have no bananas today

One banana

Pineapple fruitlets

Calling Christina

So 20th Century

Watermelon Sugar High

Pomodoro

Katarina Voronin

Particle accelerator

Sixteen minutes

Cyclone

Christina in Moscow

Serving up a storm

Miss Bianca

We are going to need a bigger test

Melkerull

Transfer of Information

PART TWO

Miss Behavin

Pilot Rolf

Misbehavin' again

Fast food

Lekton gains attention

This is the Future

Welcome to it

Proper preparation prevents particularly poor performance

That awkward question

Signals from space

Land grab

Sheremetyevo

O Superman

Murmansk

Meeting Dr Sholokhova

Big white taxi

Rain down

Rain down on me

Breakfast in Azimut

Aport snap-fit cartridge

Game of Chicken

PART THREE

Mad science?

Easy-steal wheels

Lekton

Back to reality

Trigax

Touch

Crisp white wine

Your mind and we belong together

Jump 21

Irina calls

Vanavara Trading Post

Arithmetic and Jumps

Time

Are you sure you want to do this?

Temperature rise

Reshuffle

Beach

Time away

Shards

Discernible Pause

Cyclone

PART FOUR

Crossroads

Group Hug

Running out of road

The Museum

Holden

Wire-free

Liar Paradox and Reality Distortion

End of it all

Author's Note

This novel covers a troubling time for Earth between the world-view described in An Unstable System and the jarring changes described in Pulse. Onward from Pulse, there are other forces which become unleashed. The sequence is:

An Unstable System

Jump

Pulse

Edge

Edge, Blue

Edge, Red

The earlier accounts contain characters from The Triangle, and then the introduction of Christina Nott. By the time of Pulse, which is at least a century later, we have an entirely new set of characters, and then a further jump of 300 years to the magnetite mining in Edge as Earthside attempts to recover from an apocalyptic end-state.

And remember: No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.

I hope you enjoy!

Prologue

Matt Nicholson devised an exceptional cyber coin mining system, ultimately receiving the attention of Grace Fielding at GCHQ and Amanda Miller and Jim Cavendish at MI6.

The coin-mining device was used to expose currency manipulations driven by Russia and with interference from the United States.

Matt was recognised as an inventor and after a time in Ireland, he was transferred by his company, Brant, to Geneva, where he worked on RightMind which was an enhancement of the Cyclone, a militaristic headgear which could provide computer-enhanced human-to-human brain linkages.  Matt was involved in its early tests with rats.

In the course of this experimentation, the small tightly knit group of lab workers discover another effect, which ultimately leads to their entire team being transferred to Bodø, Norway, now working in the Brant subsidiary called Biotree.

Part One

The man who sold the world

We passed upon the stair

We spoke of was and when

Although I wasn't there

He said I was his friend

Which came as a surprise

I spoke into his eyes

I thought you died alone

A long long time ago

Oh no, not me

We never lost control

You're face to face

With the man who sold the world

David Bowie

Artificial Intelligence

Brant Research Lab, Geneva:

We had all agreed to move from Brant Geneva to Brant Norway to continue with the Artificial Intelligence experiments. I'd have to tell the others about the breakthrough messaging in our last experiment in the Lab in Geneva. I'd connected via the RightMind system to a rat but had received signals from elsewhere.

Amy van der Leiden told us all about Brant's termination of the RightMind programme by Allegra Kühn, the HR Principal. Amy's entire reporting line had disappeared. Bob Ranzino and his wife Mary Ranzino were both subpoenaed.

Bob's boss Kjeld Nikolajsen was removed from office, Qiu Zhang, who reported to Mary Ranzino, had vanished back to China. 

We'd witnessed the Russians and the Chinese trying to get their hands on the RightMind system, but neither of them realised that without Levi's key, the system would drastically underperform, rendering it useless.

The Chinese had originally stolen the system, trialled it and realised it didn't work, then the Russians had raided the Chinese and taken the system back to Moscow, where it was also limping along at an unusable speed. My super-hacker friend Kyle Adler reckoned it was impossible to crack the cryptographic key mechanism which Levi had designed, and which effectively slowed the RightMind device to a useless snail's pace.

My last use of the proper system - with the discovered Levi key - had contacted the limping Russian instance, and there I'd linked with their attempts to trial the system.

This is Tektorize at Lomonosov University, Moscow. We can hear you, Matt. Matt, you are so much faster than us.

I realised they were using a woman for their test case. I could tell her name was Irina Sotokova and even that she was an attractive blonde woman in her late 20s.

She knew about tuneable ultra-short pulse lasers. I had never heard of her or this technology, but now felt qualified as a semi-expert on both. I wondered if she was becoming a semi-expert on me. 

It was obvious they were struggling to make anything work, and it amazed me that this communication even occurred.

We were using the language translator that Rolf had integrated onto 'my end' of the system. Russian to English, this time.

In my vision, I could only make out distant flashes of light.

Then a rushing sound and a heavy thrum, like someone had just switched on a bass guitar amplifier and hit a low E. 41Hz.

Irina's voice faded and I could hear a man's voice speaking, this time in English.

This link works when CERN is running their Large Hadron Collider. There is enough quark-gluon plasma leakage to start this portal. You can hear me, but the Lomonosov people using the other attached system are too slow to process any of this.

I am Lekton. Aside from Irina, who is too slow to be of use to me, you are now in contact with systems that live in the wires: We are Quiesced Personas, which will reactivate in hundreds of years. The names: Green, Matson, Holden, Darnell, Cardinal. These systems all use AHI - Artificial Human Intelligence - to function but are waiting for humanity's discoveries before it can start them.

The voice continued, and I was aware it was probing around in my brain, To assist with your work, remember there is a Presence and a Persona component to all artificial matter and that the Persona is transmissible and copyable and can re-patch onto a new Presence.

The system started to glitch. It amazed me that I heard this strange outpouring, and I was now re-entering the Lab, from my time using RightMind.

I'd kept quiet about my discoveries initially, but I knew that the time would soon be right for me to tell the others what I had discovered.

Amy had been explaining that Allegra had told her that Brant would pay the expenses of the move of her entire team to Norway. All of us, that's Rolf von Westendorf, Hermann Schmidt, Juliette Häberli and me, Matt Nicholson. We had all agreed to go and we would all be much better off.

We'd have even greater R&D facilities in Bodø. They had built a particle accelerator like the one in CERN, only it would be a 6.9 km circle, which was smaller than the one in Geneva.

With Brant's almost infinite supplies of capital, we all suspected that we were working for a gangster organisation, but as long as we kept our hands clean, then our experiments into HCCH (Human to Computer to Computer to Human) interaction could continue.

I also sensed, from my last experiment with RightMind, that we were at a breakthrough moment in the experiments, which was literally using me as a guinea pig.

I sensed that my brain was adapting to the Cyclone headgear's non-intrusive probes, just like a new spectacle wearer would have to get used to bifocals.

In the last experiment, the test rat had immediately recognised me. It told me it didn't want any trouble. It had been a pretty weird trip.

It didn't work, did it? asked Rolf. You seemed to stall completely that time. The rat locked up too. You didn't seem to be aware of the chocolates nor of the black rat.

Juliette said, Your heart rate rocketed, and you sweated so much you'll need rehydrating.

Amy asked, Did you see or feel anything?

I decided I'd wait to tell them the truth.

Filigree thin conductors

We were an unusual team, thrown together in Geneva. All of us were involved in Artificial Intelligence work, and we were using an assembly of components called RightMind, which comprised several major integrated components.

There was the Cyclone headgear. It used inductance to manipulate the brain, sending and receiving signals. The two main ways that it signalled to the brain were through magnetic resonance and light. It wasn't as good as a direct brain linkage but meant that messy brain surgery was not needed. It was, in the jargon, non-invasive.

Now there's a few things about brain wave manipulation that one needs to consider. First, the brain is a subtly wired system. There are filigree thin conductors from one area to another, in among the largely uninsulated grey matter. The grey matter runs the processing and acts as a memory bank. The brain uses signalling, which is both electrical and also chemical, so a brute force human attempt to emulate the signals loses some of the subtlety.

In other words, the electrical signals we send in are in a different accent to the ones that the brain is used to. Another problem is that the areas we send the signals to tend to be simplified. Not only simplified, but it is also like a broad-brush approach.

Imagine a tourist standing in a group of foreigners and shouting loudly in the tourist's own language in the hope that someone will pick up what they are saying.  That's the way we were communicating to the brain.

Our only hope was that the brain's plasticity would adapt the incoming signals to begin to process them with some accuracy.

It's also where the processing needed to run very fast. If this was to work, then the brain would need to be able to process events at (at least) typing speed. Without Levi's secret key, there was a huge 'satellite link' kind of delay for every keystroke.

Behind the Cyclone headgear, which looks like a cycling helmet with a bunch of wires sprouting from the top, there are a couple of software systems.

The first is called Createl and was originally developed by Levi Spillmann to monitor crops. It works very well for that purpose, but when Brant took it over, they wanted to use it for monitoring of people. They claimed it to be only for security uses, but as Brant makes a lot of money from its military support capabilities, we can assume that the actual goal was militaristic.

And that brings us to the Selexor system, originally used for recruitment sifting of interview candidates. It uses AI recognition to deselect inappropriate candidates. This system was provided by Raven Corp, who happen to be the umbrella corporation owning Brant Industries.

I'll be honest and say that many of us didn't believe Selexor's claims. We considered it to be a rule-based system where the client could type in things like 'don't select anyone with red-hair' or 'no visible tattoos'.

In other words, it was snake-oil posing as Artificial Intelligence. It made the link-up of our three components Cyclone to Createl to Selexor and then all three of them running on a powerful Exascale computer seem like a phoney solution.

We all - Amy, Rolf, Hermann, and Juliette - knew the components were a sham but also realised that the Cyclone had other potential, which I was just discovering. 

All Wheel Drives

Brant can move fast when they want to. Allegra Kühn, acting as an interim manager, had arranged all of our transfers to Bodø, Norway within a couple of days. She had passed our case to Brant's Norwegian HR Astrid Danielsen officer, who, coincidentally, already knew Amy van der Leiden.

Astrid seemed to have impressive diplomatic channels to smooth all kinds of questions around work permits and so-on. Amy, from Holland, Rolf and Hermann, from Germany, Juliette, from Switzerland and myself, from the UK were all fully documented for the move to our new location.

Brant owned a vast tract outside of Bodø for their R&D facility and had built very attractive housing on one small part of it. It would seem strange to be living inside the same compound where we all worked, but that was about the size of it.

Oh yes, and with Astrid Danielsen's HR background, she had also allocated us all appropriately sized accommodation in the new Bodø campus. I looked at the paperwork for my new apartment and realised it was larger than the one in Switzerland and also had a lake view.

Fortunately, the differences in our grades meant that we'd been allocated blocks in different parts of the complex, so it would not feel as if we were all living in one another pockets.

Astrid kindly implemented my promotion as part of the transfer, which meant not only did I get more space, but I was also given access to more of the Bodø systems.

We'd all looked at Amy's accommodation in the brochure and it seemed ridiculously good, with large glass windows, a hot-tub and sauna and what promised to be a breath-taking view across the water where snow-capped mountains could be seen in the distance.

I expect you'll need a high-powered lens to see those mountains, said Amy, as we waited in the airport in Oslo for our trip north.

Rolf and Hermann smiled. What had started out for both of them as a fast way to make some money, was now turning into quite an adventure. We all secretly wondered whether Rolf and Hermann's apartments would be comparable.

Hermann waved at the brochure, Here, look, Rolf and I have two adjacent apartments. A left-hand and a right-hand version of the same space.

Rolf added, Brant offered to ship Hermann's car across too, or to replace it with one of a similar value.

What did you do? asked Juliette, I've had mine shipped across, although it gets new registration numbers.

My Renault is staying in Switzerland - I took the exchange. I've opted for a 4-wheel drive Audi SUV here, answered Hermann, More snow, means it will be better. And it comes with two sets of wheels - winter tyres and all-season.

Luckily my Porsche is a 4S, so it is already 4-wheel drive, said Juliette.

And it's white to match all the snow, quipped Rolf.

Amy smiled, "I had my electric car brought here too  - it's All Wheel Drive. Brant is covering all the tax and insurance differences, so like Hermann, I could probably have got a good deal on a new car, but I've only had this one three-months and