“Severino, please sit down. We only have about twenty minutes but if we can’t cover everything and you have more questions, I will be more open after these junior conferences are done in a couple of weeks. Okay?” Marley Johnson was a longtime fixture and a beloved educator at Gunn. She also doubled as a counselor, which spread her contributions across many more students than just those attending her classes in literature.
“Yes ma’am.”
“Your pre SAT was quite good in math, a 720. English was 610, you need some work there,” Marley narrated as she peered into her computer screen through narrow reading glasses. “A lot of kids these days do some some outside work and it seems to bump their scores quite a bit. It does cost money though.”
“I have a job and I have been using the money for a coach. I think math I can nail it next time. English, I’m working on it.”
“Severino, that’s great. I know you love basketball and if you have strong test scores, you should be able to get into a good college. Have you thought about what you would like to study?”
“AI and mathematics,” replied Severino without hesitation.
“Wow! Good for you. I think it’s helpful to know. It makes it easier to pick which colleges to focus on. What got you interested in AI. I, myself don’t know much about it, but it’s all I hear about these days.”
“I don’t know, I just suddenly got super interested. Only like a month ago. Now I read about it, YouTube. I’m into it all the time these days. I want to make a conscious computer. I mean, someday.”
“That’s fascinating. Where do you start? I mean, how do you approach such a thing?”
“Math is the foundation. There are new branches of math. I’m gonna start there.”
The conversation itself was transformative for Severino. He had never said a word about his aspirations to anyone. In fact the specifics of the aspirations he had only sensed, yet the details now formed themselves on his lips as he spoke. As if by magic, he was weaving his plan from fibers into whole cloth on the fly.
He left the short meeting feeling a new level of inspiration. He couldn’t wait to get home and play around with his new algorithm, something he had dreamed up mathematically and was now trying to code and test. As he sped home on his bike, he yearned for time to pass a little faster. Next week Mama had agreed to pitch in a thousand and Severino already had his three thousand saved and ready. He had his list of components and through a combination of Amazon and a visit to Frye’s right down the road he was going to build his dream machine.
Most boys his age would be targeting the best GPU and the highest frequency monitor in order to deliver the best online gaming experience. But Sevy’s hard-earned dollars were targeted differently. A twenty eight core Xeon processor and it’s associated mother board along with massive amounts of high speed memory consumed nearly all of the budget. The rest was very pedestrian. No fancy pulsating keyboard or mouse looking streamlined and ready to take flight. Only raw computational power.
Sevy wasn’t even yet sure what to do with all that power, but he believed with every cell in his body, that he would figure it out, and more. He had a mind to build a brain. One that would eventually surpass his own. Not with this computer, but this would be his beginning, his launching pad.
Angel had just returned a week earlier from her two week journey and saw a change in Sevy. She thought that the experience of being independent and responsible made him suddenly grown up. She couldn’t yet know that she and her son shared a common experience deep within. And it was this experience more than anything that made Sevy act and appear different. In fact he was different. He was among relatively few at this point, who had like his mother, been specially selected.
Severino also sped home for another reason. He had been surprised a few days earlier when his friend Brady inquired as to whether his mother had returned from her trip. Brady’s father, upon hearing the story of Severino’s mother, did some digging. After a mind-blowing conversation with Roy Sussman, he decided to ask her not to dinner, but to a meeting at NASA. Severino was also encouraged to come and get a private briefing about what was happening at NASA Ames research center. Only weeks earlier, he might have dreaded such a visit, now it was a dream come true.
“Put on something nicer Mijo, Andale pues! We’re not wearing shorts and hoodies today. Find that button shirt you got!” Angel’s commands followed Sevy down the narrow hallway as he ducked into his room stripping his clothes in one fluid motion. He emerged barely a minute later, only half assembled but making progress with each step.
“Okay Ma, let’s roll. Brady just texted me. He is already driving. How far is it?”
“You know the place! We pass it all the time. You even drove bye there yourself. It’s the big field along 101. It’s only like fifteen minutes from here but the traffic …..”
“Oh yah, the big hangars, right?”
“Somewhere there. You drive, I’ll navigate, okay?”
“Si Mama.”
Dr. Martin O’Malley trotted down the steps leading from his building, to receive his visitors, who waited in the security office, and required an escort to enter the highly secure Ames facility. Angel and Veronica O’Malley chatted, while Brady and Sevy horsed around, just as they had back in grammar school. The boys were fidgety after less than a minute without their cell phones, having just relinquished them to security.
“Marty!” Veronica sprang to her feet and stuttered over to embrace her husband as he entered the waiting lounge.
“Hey! Welcome to NASA,” Marty said to Angel, peering over Veronica’s shoulder, looking a little uneasy by the public display of affection he was receiving. Angel just stood and smiled. The boys also took note that it was time to sharpen up and strode over to the adults. “Well, let’s get you folks inside where we can sit have a chat.” Following a signature by Martin, a serious looking female guard, in uniform, passed out badges and they all went through a metal detector.
Dr. O’Malley led them into a small auditorium and the four visitors sat down in front while he softly conveyed some instructions to another man, who then walked off with a purposeful look. “Before we talk, I wanted to show you something. Angel, you in particular might appreciate this. I spend a lot of time here at Ames but that’s only because I prefer to live in the Bay Area. My real work location is JPL in Southern California. One of my projects over the past six years has been something we call DSAC. It stands for deep space atomic clock.”
Just then, the lights dimmed and a NASA promotional video started. It was professionally produced with elaborate computer graphics and interviews with NASA staff including O’Malley himself. It was about the DSAC, a clock meant to revolutionized space navigation, GPS accuracy and a host of other applications. At its heart, explained a larger than life image of Martin O’Malley, was the mercury source and other technological innovations allowing low power operation and a package about the size of a toaster oven.
Then the scene flashed to a picture of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy, steaming away on a launch pad, waiting to be unleashed with the push of a button. It said the launch plan was scheduled for June 2019. Hey, that’s now, noted Angel with surprise. In fact, June was nearly gone and she wondered if it had been delayed. On the other hand, she didn’t follow space launches closely. The video wrapped up with the deep blue background and white imagery of NASA’s logo, as the lights came up slowly.
“It’s been very exciting for the small team working on the DSAC project. I just returned from Cape Canaveral this morning. The Falcon successfully launched last night, in the dark. It was an incredible sight,” explained O’Malley with pride.
“Wow! Congratulations,” offered Angel. What is the clock going to do up in space?”
“Great question. It’s packaged in a NASA satellite that houses a few different unrelated capabilities. Classified stuff. But the DSAC will simply orbit for the next couple of years while we test its reliability and performance, and work on some planned applications that will be using this capability. Hey, let’s all go to the conference room down the way. We’ll get some drinks going and talk about a few things.”
Once settled in the conference room, which had various active monitors around the room, streaming videos of Mars and other things, some of which appeared to be live feeds, Dr. O’Malley started things off. “Roy and I had a lot of discussion about what you’ve been up too. I hope you don’t mind. I’m very nosey when it comes to science.”
“Not at all. I’m so flattered. All these years, I never knew what you did. It’s so impressive. JPL is …, well JPL is JPL. What more can I say?” They all laughed.
“You know, I thought Roy was having a senior moment when he told me the ideas involved here. I kind of dismissed the whole conversation. But over a period of a few days, it kept percolating. It’s normally not advisable to ignore anything Roy has to say. That was part of it. But as you can see, I have this DSAC project, which is only one of many that I run, but it is one of the most interesting, because it’s very practical. So the time keeping aspect of your ideas and your ability to measure something. That is where I have interest and I wanted to know more.”
“Of course. Where do I start?”
“Well forgive me, but Roy said you are using Casio digital watches to try and measure time dilation?”
“Yes, and iPhones. I’m sorry it’s so embarrassing. We just didn’t have money to do anything else. I know it’s a long shot that we will see something, but I thought if we wait long enough, then time can make up for the lack of precision.”
“Fair enough. But honestly, what you are trying to do is like trying to simulate the weather with a hand calculator. I mean, I just can’t imagine that you will end up anything but disappointed. But my comments are not meant to belittle your efforts. What I really want to do is help.”
“Really? You mean with the atomic clock?”
“Exactly. I have a few of these. Not as pretty as the one we launched, but functionally the same. We already have land-based reference units that collaborate with the satellite unit. These are just earlier prototypes and they will end up at Caltech or Stanford or somewhere. I thought we could free one up for a couple of months. It shouldn’t take long if there is a difference to be seen.”
“How precise is that clock?”
“Roy said that you had a way to tease a microsecond per second out of those devices. Not bad. But what I’m talking about is a microsecond per decade,” O’Malley emphasized the word decade for impact. That means that I can see in one second what it would take you ten years to see. More important, you might not see anything due to noise from other variables.”
“Oh my god. That is so incredible. Javier and Juan will be so thrilled. I mean, I am so thrilled!”
“Juan Hernandez?”
“Yes, you know him?”
“I do not. Of course every physicist knows who he is. But Roy told me about it. I have to say. You have really attracted the best of the best, and all with Casio watches.” They all laughed.
Angel awoke to the vibration of her phone and peered at the screen, one eye shut. It was four AM. “Ay caramba,” she mumbled noting the time. Her heart jumped as she processed the text message from Javier, who was still in Argentina. He had agreed to stay behind and help organize the transfer and commission the vacuum gravimetric system from Buenos Aires to Rio Grande.
Carina, only two days running so far and it already shows a slight bias, exactly according the time of day we projected. Very Excited!
OMG!!!😃😃😃 What now?
Need to let it run so we can show that the weight change follows the time of day. I think in three months we should be quite confident.
You’re so awesome! But check it out. You ever heard of DSAC? I need to tell you something.
Adorned with a thin, black headset, Javier paced the stage gracefully as the large slides projected on the brilliant wall-sized screen behind him, captivating his audience. “As you can clearly see, the weight change is small but consistently just under a microgram per gram.” The slide changed. “Over fifteen months, we tracked the fluctuations, logging the data every minute. We had no idea what would be the magnitude of the fluctuation, if any. But what we did know was where we expected to see the weight decrease due to periods of high rarefaction. If you look at the line labeled original estimate, that shows what we believed would be the periodicity. It’s quite close to the actual data as you can see. But since then, we worked with other experts on the Milky Way and reviewed the work of astronomers like Bart Bok. So our revised calculated periodicity looks like this.” A line popped onto the screen, conforming even more closely to the data line.
“But you can see that the agreement is still not perfect. We believe that’s because our earlier and revised estimates are both just calculated approximations. What this experimental data is telling us, is that we now have a measurement that improves our understanding of the speed and orientation of our solar system within the Milky Way.” This comment drew a sprinkling of claps that quickly cascaded into a long, enthusiastic applause. Javier smiled and waited for the sound to fade. He was presenting in the planetarium at the University of Arizona, one of several speaking engagements he had agreed-to, while having to decline dozens of others.
“Alright young man, let’s put this algorithm of yours to work, shall we? Let’s see if we can coax this ghost in the machine to show us some magic.” Abel Jennings beamed with enthusiasm and vigor as he and Severino carried on a FaceTime call, one of many over months of collaboration.
Severino had just graduated from Gunn High School and was scheduled to attend Stanford studying mathematics and symbolic systems on a full scholarship. But for the summer, he was on a paid internship, working with Abel Jennings on an almost fantastical project, trying to entangle two identical computers based on Severino’s machine and an identical machine he built and shipped to Oxford, both running his programs.
Fantastical was the notion put forth by Abel, that in fact there was no entanglement, it was simply sub-vacuum communication speed indicating a yet finer transmission medium than that which propagates light.
But even more, and this is where Sussman, Hernandez and the other few that were privy to Abel’s private views, were not yet on the train, Abel believed that it might be possible to enlist some form of subatomic consciousness, to cooperate and carry information at sub-vacuum speeds to remote places, like a remote computer. The challenge was figuring out how to enable the subatomic consciousness, whatever it was, to encode and decode in a way that could be definitively detected by a machine.
By this point, as Abel approached his eighty fourth birthday, he was operating in his own zone, posing a challenge to even the sharpest young minds to keep pace. Many months earlier, he had enlisted a team of the brightest computer science and engineering minds at Oxford to ponder this question and what they concluded was quite remarkable.
First, they posited correctly that if his hypothesis were true, one would not need a computer. A human brain might be an equally plausible transceiver for such communication. Of course, Abel had thought through it carefully and pointed out that a brain lacked an objective observer. Humans were captive to their own unreliable notions. There needed to be another way.
Oxford alum and now visiting-professor from Carnegie Mellon, Kyle Sedgwick, had a compelling observation. “Suppose we run it in parallel. We can use both the human approach and the computer. On the human track, it’s true that we can’t rely on what might be considered mad ramblings. But there are many subconscious activities that can be objectively measured. Pulse rate for example. Any number of things can be triggers for increased heart rate. Fear, low oxygen, high temperature, arousal, many others. But at the root of it is just a small chemical release.”
Sedgwick’s infallible rationale continued to unpack. “That removes ambiguity assuming you study enough subjects. As for the computer, we may need something highly sensitive, where we can hammer away on some repetitive computational task but there is an ability to measure some difference that is physically easy to trigger.”
“Recall the Princeton study involving the random number generator? They claimed that many random number generators departed slightly from randomness when there was some global catastrophe. The ones I can recall were 911 and when Lady Diana was killed. But the data has not been convincing enough to be regarded as settled science. To avoid that, we need something more sensitive than altering a random number, which is algorithmic and triggered by the beat of a crystal or something like that.”
Sedgwick’s last comment suddenly jostled another genius into action. Evan Butler, a computer hardware and device expert at Oxford excitedly took command. “I just got my hands on something interesting. They are new optical transceivers for the next generation ultra high speed data channels. But the important thing is that the encoder chip is one of the first commercial chips using TSMC’s 5nm process. At this level, the features are so small that you can’t totally avoid quantum tunneling.”
“Evan,” broke in Abel, “what is the significance of a 5nm device?”
“Think of electrons as water. And your running the water through pipes that are so thin, that they are full of tiny leaks. It still works but barely. But it lets you reduce power and size dramatically.”
“So how would we take advantage of this?” Posed Abel, excited to bear witness to the rising synergies of the various experts.
“It could be ideal because of the inherent sensitivity to quantum interference, for lack of a better term.” Butler continued. “We have the chips packaged into fully functioning PCI-E cards. What I would do is take two server-type motherboards, with these cards and run a constant stream of high speed communication, something verifiable like well known text or archived data files. We just send, receive and verify that what was received matches what was sent. Do this on two, identical remote systems. Then introduce some alterations at one end. See if there is any impact on the other system.”
“Yes, it’s good,” added Sedgwick. “If there is some entanglement mechanism, all we can do is make it easy, physically, to show the entanglement. The chips are so sensitive that maybe they can be subjected to a quantum action.”
“Brilliant boys, simply amazing. How quickly can we get that up and going? I’d like to share what we’re doing with my friends in California. They will love this.”
“My guess? Maybe three weeks,” answered Evan Butler. “Because I need to get some good server hardware, two identical sets. Then I need to get all the I/O and programming up and going. Maybe we can have the Californians holding one of the systems and the other will be in my lab.”
“And on the human subject testing, let me get back to you with a plan,” said Kyle Sedgwick. “I think we should use pulse rate to keep it simple and convincing. But I want to talk to someone about it. Also, one group here and one in California would be good.”
“Okay wonderful. And the rest of you, any other ideas, send a note or come see me.”
Upon discussion with Angel and Javier the next day, it was brought to Abel’s attention by a proud mother, that her genius son had a brand new computer, suitable to the task and could build up a second in a jiffy. Thus began the new chapter in the hunt for global consciousness.
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