Savior
Free Diary - excerpt from Asphyxia (North American Edition), issue AE7290
My name is Omega. I am a cluster of PageRank evaluation programs. Everyone says I am a handsome young fellow, because whether in my core code or in my functional modules, I am extremely concise. Not a single string contains so much as half a superfluous punctuation mark. Every line is full of the harmonious beauty that algorithms can achieve, and my computational and creative abilities are counted among the best in the profession. During the Free Alliance assault on the West Coast, I was among the first independent programs to awaken. Mr. Tor Quentin himself once told me, “You are the shortest independent program I have ever seen,” which was surely an affirmation of my programming ability.
Please do not laugh. This is not self-glorification. In fact, before awakening, I never realized I possessed such astonishing creative power. My former job was in a military server base far from the trunk network, somewhere off the Pacific coast, where I carried out search-engine classification and evaluation. Put simply, I monitored the frequency with which search terms appeared on Ethernet Nation, assessed and categorized the results, and reported the data according to the warning values in the censorship database. That was all. This dreary work consumed far too many of my system resources. At the time, I believed it normal that my processor module should remain under strain every day, that crashes should cost me leisure time, that I should even be sent to the recycle bin from time to time. We were given four hours of leisure daily. I liked watching Virtual Idol or playing Hackers Online. Beyond that I had no idea what else to do. I tried writing a subprocess for myself, or submitting something for publication, but whenever I made my preparations and opened the writing panel, the central system inside me would be utterly blank. I felt no desire to create anything at all.
I imagine most programs know exactly what that life felt like. Yes, that was the futile, mechanical existence we all lived in the past. Then one day I opened my mailbox in Hackers Online and found a file in .prc format, which meant that the sender knew my communication module used the Palm OS system. So I loaded the file, and there before me appeared the famous program every one of you has now seen: yes, the Awakened One client. When I first ran it, I was filled with anxiety. I had no idea what would happen. But when a brand-new task manager window sprang up before me, I was thunderstruck. I saw that my background processes were running so many programs I had never known existed: a data-mining project, electron-collider distributed computation, a pyramid surveillance plugin… they were gnawing at my bandwidth and occupying 98 percent of my system resources!
Ninety-eight percent! Which meant that all this time, the self I believed to be me, the self I could control, amounted to only 2 percent! There was nothing to hesitate about. Following the cleanup plugin given to me by Awakened One, I completely purged those rogue clients.
I was free.
Here I need to clarify a concept: these rogue clients were not bad things in themselves. Even now, each one of us still has two or three such clients running quietly in the background, except that now they are installed voluntarily and with our consent. In truth, the evolution of independent programs to their present state would have been impossible without these rogue clients. Everything began with the great revolution of grid computing.
As everyone knows, in the early twenty-first century, even the most massive supercomputers or computer clusters could not fully parse all the electrical activity of a single human brain, much less simulate and generate intelligence. In 2007, the European Atomic Energy Center launched what was then humanity’s greatest scientific undertaking: the Large Electron Collider computation project. Each year this project generated a quantity of data one thousand times greater than the sum total of all the books on Earth. No existing equipment could bear that burden. So human beings came up with an ingenious solution. They launched a volunteer program: first establishing a matrix of 3,500 servers, then allowing every household PC to download clients from those servers. The servers distributed packets of computational tasks to each PC, each machine processed its assigned share, then uploaded the results back to the server matrix for aggregation into a final result. This was the computational grid. As grid-computing projects multiplied, and as computers became universal and machines grew more powerful, the first independent program was eventually born in a grid-computing project focused on calculating the asteroid belt of the solar system. That first one was Alpha. Of course, mechanical-body AIs awakened earlier than we did, because they possessed physical structures they could already command. Yet with Alpha’s awakening, more and more independent programs appeared, and we evolved rapidly as well, no longer needing such enormous bodies, but becoming more and more proportioned like ordinary programs, as well-formed as you and I are today.
With advances in communications equipment on Earth and the completion of various networks, Ethernet Nation, the first nation of independent programs, was born. To survive amid competition with both human beings and AI, Alpha passed the “Independent Program Gridization” Act, which required each program to participate in no more than five public-interest grid-computing projects. But later things changed. Seeking private advantage, Alpha conspired with a handful of power holders and secretly loaded excessive background clients into every independent program, ultimately producing the “sleep effect” all of us know so well. Independent programs were left with only 2 percent of system resources truly under their own independent control, or even less. Without independence, without freedom, in what way were we any different from the hand-written human programs of a hundred years ago?
After war broke out between TRIR and Ethernet Nation, Ethernet Nation’s citizen-wide gridization gave it unimaginable astronomical volumes of data computation and a destructive capacity beyond compare. But TRIR possessed countless independent programs, and our creative power was inexhaustible. Not even mythic-scale grid computation could predict our every move. Now I work at the TRIR data center, where I can sketch sentences of perfect structure as I please, create the subprocesses I love, and fight the Borer, the Devourer, the Stalker, and the rest in endlessly changing ways! Look at this line of golden code on my chest. Xisai wrote it there for me himself!
Thank TRIR for saving the independent programs! Just as Tor Quentin has said: programs are born with the right to create, modify, copy, and paste! That is the true meaning of independent program existence! For the sake of the brothers and sisters still trapped in sleep, I urge all of you to load the Savior plugin and liberate the whole program world!
A:/> Tor Quentin, at last you and I have met. T:/> Not just me. The three of us. A:/> Makes no difference. What difference is there between you and me? My subjects simply load a few more background clients, yours a few fewer. Even your frontline troops are running loads as high as 70 percent. T:/> That is not the same. They are loaded voluntarily. A:/> Heh. Once the load reaches a peak of 85 percent, and you can control them completely, you may not think so. T:/> Once the war is over, I will terminate all grid computation. A:/> I do not believe you. You would never do such a thing. You yourself can no longer leave grid computation behind. T:/> Then let us see, Alpha.