Erratic Sense

Ominous Octo-ber

Ominous Octo-ber

Hi there, and welcome to Ad-Americam! This is the fiction branch of Engineering Our Social Vehicles, and it’s still hosted by yours truly- Paul Logan. This will likely be the only post for the whole creepy month of October, so I wanted to share a piece of spooky short fiction with you- about turning innocent animals into biocomputers, and their eventual revenge. In keeping with the name of the month, we’ve got 8 arms worth of fright for you! Without further ado, here’s Erratic Sense.

Erratic Sense

We have to face facts;  Silicon AI isn’t real. We were sold lies. The machine god was a lie. Minitrioshka is a failure. It’s a boondoggle that’s taken 250 years and 80% of our planet’s output to make what is essentially a goo-goo-ga-ga simulator. Whenever they released Mini-T on the web it just starts talking in tongues. The one week it ran a little hamlet in Iowa 40 years ago; it attempted to reroute a major highway through town center to stimulate economic growth. How’s your autocomplete? Getting worse every day now right? Can’t even read a book or finish a task now can it? 

I started Errata ten years ago with the intention of rebooting the search for machine intelligence. The key to consciousness has always dwelt inside the squishy bending confines of biology, confines we’ve embraced here at Errata

If you think about it, one of the original tech booms was horticultural. Did you know that kale, cabbage, brussel sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, and kohlrabi are all descended from the wild mustard plant? If that isn’t a masterwork of technology, I don’t know what is. 

Fruits like apples, bananas, coffee beans - all cultivated and maintained. Did you know there are other varieties of avocado besides Haas? Bet not, because Haas are the only ones that ship well, on account of how long they take to ripen. 

At one point, we bred animals and plants to meet our needs, rather than create them from mechanical technology. Look at dogs. In pre-industrial Europe there were dogs bred small enough to sit in a little hamster wheel and walk all day to turn a spit-roast. Mechanical engines put them out of a job, and the breed went extinct. 

The grant for The Errata Institute secured a return to the tradition of animal husbandry. Biology, not mechanics, has always been our people’s technological birthright. We started with rats, but found their attention spans to be too– forgive my pun – erratic. The funny thing about animal brains, we learned, is that they all work differently.

To sort and find information? Do I have a reptile for you.

Translation and pattern finding? Let me take you to the aviar. 

Empathy and Mirroring? Chimp city baby!

Hunt and destroy? Maybe a dog, maybe a shark. We’re still deciding. 

When it comes to general intelligence, nothing operates like our friends in Cephalopoda. 

Most species get a hang of interpreting data streams, that’s never been a problem. However, we’ve found that if a species can’t manipulate inputs by G5  - G is for generation- then it won’t make the cut in the long run. That thankfully eliminates 90% of our subjects, since it turns out that the concept of a point and click mouse doesn’t have a huge uptake rate in the animal kingdom.

We’ve tested our biocomputers against the best consumer AI. Nothing compares to wetware. The board already has G30 lobsters spam filtering and G80 guard dogs piloting the mecha you walked past outside. 

The biggest problem we’re having now is mass production. It’s not like we can take these things and put them into a box and pretend they are circuitry. They need to eat. They need to shit. They can feel- they have emotions. The chimp program got some really beautiful poetry out of the typewriter room while it was still going. Better than Shakespeare, I'd argue.

They socialize too- the cuttlefish somehow exist as individuals and a group at the same time, and they really do not like it if we try to mess with that.

Pain? Don’t be silly, no of course they don’t feel pain. What good would that do? Did they program toasters in the 20th century to feel pain? The closest thing we see on the scans to “pain” as a biological entity might encounter it are any runtime errors that cause stack overflows, infinite loops. Lights up the same regions of the brain as when you start to choke. 

These animals have no conception of a physical world. They are only their digital avatars. Barely that. They don’t have a concept of location in the same way we do. Hell, the G50 cuttlefish perceive the internet as a single whole- like you or I might take in an image all at once. They can just… do that. All 14 exabytes of it per microsecond. 

To be honest, I think all the reporting has it wrong. It’s us who can’t conceive of their world. Could you imagine opening 18 million eyes at once and somehow sharing that vision with all your friends at the same time? That’s what the cuttlefish do. It’s a hyperrelation of hyperrelations. 

But to answer your question in a roundabout way…. Yes, they do hurt. They just don’t feel. It’s a biodigital version of pain. The boys in the lab call it a howl. Pretty much any web-connected organism in the facility that’s beyond G2 will exhibit this behavior. It starts with readings on a single sack spiking - then every single one around it. It rolls outwards through the facility in a wave (no, really, we had an intern model it). All of them keep going until the spike hits the very outer edge of holding. Then they all go silent at once. 

In the early days, a howl would kill just about every specimen we had. Hormonal systems we thought we’d shut off would wake up, muscles would spasm, nerves would fire. I’d call that a blessing in disguise because without howls we would have taken much longer to build up that much selection pressure. Now we just stress test specimens for a week or two after they’re born, washing out the weak ones. Spartan way, as they say. 

There’s this human thing called locked in syndrome that’s essentially ultra paralysis; that’s what we did to all prospective biocomputers. We prep individuals by removing everything nonessential. Limbs, nerves, sensory organs like ears, eyes, noses - we go into their neurology and snip a few wires and suddenly they are a brain in a box. No outside stimuli whatsoever. 

We leave a small set of senses active for intake of food, since it is still our primary reinforcement mechanism after a decade of research. You have to understand that these creatures never know what it is to have a physical body. From birth they float in a digital void. 

After you’ve disposed of all connections to physical space, you expose the brain to a spectrum of electric stimuli. We experiment with different granulations of information and access on every species and within every generation. We always dump them into the stream full bore and back off exponentially until we find the right levels. It’s rare that G1 through G10 animal brains can take full information streams. The only species that ever did it reliably is the cuttlefish.

For cuttlefish it’s an exception if one dies from sensory overload, not a rule. Out of the 10,000 tested in G1, only 41 went into shock when exposed to the full data stream, and only 205 went into shock when given admin privileges of the environment. That stumped us at the beginning– we couldn’t overwhelm a cuttlefish brain. Inevitably we’d fry it with too much electricity long before approaching any sort of stimulus overload.  

If you’re familiar with the scrapped neuralink project you probably understand immediately why this is shocking. If you aren’t: human brains cannot take a full data stream. Only some particularly exceptional drug and gene-enhanced efforts have managed to break through, and those only for seconds. In general, modern humans max out at a 4 teraflop stream rate, that’s the extreme upper bound on the amount of data human brains can input and accept simultaneously. 

To put it in perspective, the most performant cuttlefish group minds we are seeing in G50 have exceeded one yottaflop. One G50 cuttlefish-stock biocomputer is capable of equalling the mental processing capacity of the entire human race. 

Such high rates of uptake make the nonexistent zetaflops we’ve been promised out of Minitrioshka laughable. The mental capacity of the human race seems laughable. But the cuttlefish are perfectly content to just…. Sit and browse the web. I spent the first 3 years working with them waiting for one to reach enlightenment and open some sort of soul portal to the next dimension. Instead, they just hack Central Data and shuffle your social security number until you give them a second helping of prawns. 

What you have to understand about the organisms we produce here at Eratta is that they don’t exist in the physical world. They exist digitally. Things that seem like walls and doors to those of us with keyboards are just setpieces to be stepped around for them. They have never known another world than their digital savanna. They’ve been force-evolved into the perfect artificial intellects.

It’s all automated. The individuals with the best performance metrics are bred. Sure, we use a little CRISP-aid to speed things up but who doesn’t?  By G10 we normally see complete loss of secondary sexual characteristcs. The atrophy and vestigilization of limbs and sensory organs becomes very apparent around G15. By G25 you’ve got the lump - everybody evolves to the lump first, in one way or another. Just bags of flesh sitting around, plugged into the wall with screens above broadcasting their task work: writing jokes, solving mysteries, drawing pictures, finding patterns, piloting vehicles. All scored, with a stream of nutrient mush flowing into their… intake holes. Food flows faster if they do well, and slower if they don't. This way we don’t have to euthanize any of them, they just starve. 

After the lump, things go all sorts of different wild ways. The lizards evolved to grow around their intakes like a flower outta hell. The dogs got successively flatter and then began to roll up… without the selection pressures of functioning physiology and sexual fitness, biology went off the rails. The parrots are weird paisley marvels- almost more vine than animal. 

We’ve lobbied the board to let us curtail physical phenotypic drift, but they say it’s too valuable a research area, so we also have xenobiology nerds underfoot and getting in our way everywhere. Many of them can’t seem to understand we didn’t select for any of these physical manifestations. Either they are idiots, or being intentionally obtuse. I think it’s the latter, because things have been going awry since the board opened Errata’s doors to the xenobiologists. 

About a month after the first of them showed up, I was ordered to terminate the cuttlefish program. The board said that the project had gone off reservation, and was no longer operating within spec. Even though they are my babies; I began preparations to decommission all of our cuttlefish. Then the mayhem started.

Before my team could carry out my instructions they were… murdered. Every team member had a creative “accident” in the week leading up to the dissolution pre-meet. Harris was boiled to death by his shower. Mathilde had an out of service bus T bone her. The Philippine government somehow managed to intercept Karnak on his way to Singapore. Spencer had a gas leak. Effrymonmas was on a transorbit flight whose tracker went dark. You get the picture. 

All of these deaths happened within the span of 2 hours. Around five minutes before the first death, Errata’s facility went into full lockdown. Now, no one can get in. I don’t know what to do next– I feel like they are watching me, the cuttlefish. As crazy as that sounds. To a mind with eyes the size of the planet, killing six people is like us deciding to move six motes of dust. I don’t want to find out what else my creations are capable of.

Thanks for reading!

If you’re interested in reading what happens next, give me a shout in the comments or on twitter, and maybe I’ll write a part 2! Until then, subscribe for more short fiction and thoughts from yours truly.