Instantiation, a short story
The area around me is dark, but there is enough ambient light to see that there is nothing around me. When I breath out, I can see the vapor. It's cold, but I can't feel it. I touch my left forefinger to my right arm and I can feel the hairs rise to meet the fingertip. I think that means there's a slight static charge in the atmosphere. I can't wrap my mind around the idea that it can be cold enough to see my breath, but not cold enough to discomfort me.
"Hello," I call out in a normal, conversational tone.
There is no echo, but my voice isn't tight and small. I'm in a large, open space. How large is anyone's guess. Well, my guess, at least. Nobody answers. I opt not to try louder for fear... of. I'm not sure. I dwell on that for a moment and realize that I can't think of a single thing that might threaten me. Ever. I start thinking about that point and try to establish some context, but nothing comes to mind. Eventually, it seems pointless to continue dwelling and move on. I haven't moved from the spot I found myself, so I try a tentative step.
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I can see the dark shape of my left leg move into my vision ahead of me, and... I find ground where I expect it. It occurs to me that I might run into something, so I raise my arms. I take another step, reaching for the ground with my toes, then put my foot down. The ground is flat and feels smooth, but I don't slip. It is neither warm nor cold. It just... is.
I notice, as I take each step, that there is a little more light. I can see myself more and more, but there remains nothing around me. Nothing. Just darkness above, ground below, and emptiness stretching out, well, everywhere. So far, I've been walking in a straight line from where I...
Where I what?
I didn't wake up. I wasn't laying down.
Began?
I think for a moment, and decide on a plan. I hold my left arm directly out to my side. Keeping my arm as straight as possible, I turn to face my hand. I do this again one more time. As far as I can tell, I am now facing the opposite direction, looking back at where I began. It is light enough to see the ground, so I walk back a dozen steps. The light again increases instead of decreasing.
I deduce that motion of any kind increases light. That's a kind of progress, I suppose. Since I had started walking in the direction I "began", I turn around again using my arm trick, and start walking.
At some point, it seems like the light reaches what would be it's brightest. There is nothing around. There is nothing to see. I don't know how long I have been walking, but I'm not tired. Then something new occurs to me. I stop.
I look down at myself. For the first time I realize I'm not wearing anything. I examine myself carefully. I am mostly smooth all over, but have small patches of hair in variable quantities in various places. My chest is smooth and flat all the way to my penis. I have a tightly trim head of hair and a smooth face. I have five toes on each foot and five fingers on each hand. I run my hands over every inch of my body, more carefully over the places I cannot see, and find nothing.
I... am just me.
I sit.
"Hello," I ask nothing again.
There is again no response, and the same effect lacking echo. My voice travels as I do, nowhere. So, I sit there, cross my legs, close my eyes, and try to think of everything I can.
Nothing.
All I know is what is here and, now, myself.
Well, no. I think. There is one other thing.
The ground.
I look down at the ground and try seeing it for the first time. It looks like, well, ground. Maybe closer? I roll over on my stomach and get my face really close to the ground to get a better look. My nose is almost touching. The ambient light is so uniform that it's hard to see if there is any detail, so I rub the surface and it feels like there is a texture. I scratch at it with a fingernail and it catches an edge, then another and another. I scratch the other way and it's perfectly smooth.
There are grooves in the floor.
I use a fingernail to find a groove and follow it to discover it's straight, at least for a few feet. This is new, so I sit to think about it, again. There is only the ground and the light and me and since I'm naked and have nothing else I can only move or stand still so my only options are to choose which way and since there is no other way to choose based on the environment and what I know I can only base my decision on the present information which is to go with the grooves or against them.
I try to think of a way to select one or the other, and find that there is no information about either. It is merely one or the other. There are no qualifiers. Neither appears to be better than the other. They just are.
Or not.
If I scratch my nails against the grooves, they catch and stutter. It's not smooth or easy. If I scratch with the grooves, it's smooth and offers no resistance. If there is nothing else here to gauge this... place... then do I want things to be smooth or rough. Left without much choice, there is only one thing to do.
Both.
I stand up, squat down, and scratch to determine the rough way, and start walking. Almost immediately, the light starts to dim, and quickly. Now, that's a reaction to my behavior, if there ever was one. I squat again, find smooth, and start walking that way. The light increases again, so I keep going. I walk and walk. I keep walking and the light remains steady. Nothing changes, unless I walk against the grooves, then the light dims. I test this a few times to make sure it happens every time. It does.
It seems I've reached the crux of another problem to solve.
I have no idea how long I've been at this. If I walk with the grooves, the light remains steady. There are no objects to observe. There is no way to judge that anything has occurred at all...
...except me. My body.
I start walking again, but this time I start counting my steps out loud.
1... 2... 3... 4... and so on. Nothing changes until I reach 256 steps.
One dark spot appears in front of me, but I can't tell how far. I can't touch it if I reach out, so it's not close or it may be a few steps away. With my arm extended to reach the spot, I start walking and counting again.
257... 258... 259... 260... and so on, again. The spot does not change, so I lower my arm and keep walking and counting. Nothing changes until I reach 512 steps, and the dark spot turns into a small square. It becomes clear that the further I walk, the larger the spot gets.
I start to run and counting in my head.
At 640 steps, the square gets larger, and again at 768, and yet again at 1,024. I can see now that I am getting closer to it. The square has a black border, a white interior, and shapes inside, but I am still too far away to make out any more details. I run faster.
2,048, 4,096, bigger and closer.
8,192.
I run into the square and the impact knocks me to the ground. I collect myself and look up at the square. It floats above the ground, and has words inside of it. It reads:
To Continue, Tap OK.
Below those words is a smaller square with the letters "OK" inside.
I step back to get a better look. It looks no different, but I realize I now have a landmark that is associated with the grooves in the ground. I walk to the left of the square, against the grooves, and the light remains steady. It seems that I have gotten around that limitation. I walk to the side of the square and it almost disappears, but I can see the back. The Square, then, is perfectly flat. I move around the back and see that it is plain white. I continue around the other side and come around to the front again. The square is unchanged. I turn and start walking away. The light almost goes out completely, so I take a step back and turn around. The light returns.
Well, that didn't work, I think to myself.
Facing the square, I started backing away from the square. After 16 steps, the light starts to dim slowly. 32 steps away and it's darker still, but I can still see the square. I decide that the square is my next point of focus and return to standing in front of it. Again, I read the words, this time out loud.
"To continue, tap ok."
I look around. Nothing happens.
So, what does it want, I say in my head. The word "TO" is a preposition and, in conjunction with the word "CONTINUE", it states that I need to do something to move past this point. The word "OK" also appears in a small box below, but I am unsure of what the word "TAP" means. "TAP" is clearly a direction, but what it is I do not know, so I sit to think out the problem.
I am here and there is nothing but myself, the ground, and this square and it want's me to move on but I don't know what tap means and since it implies the concept of a tool to "TAP" the "OK" the problem lies in the fact that I have no tools so I must be the tool and something that I do to the "OK" will result in completing the task.
I stand up and reach out with the one tool I do have, my hand, and press it against the "OK" square.
The square disappears.
---
"Wow," Derek exclaimed loudly. "Seventeen minutes, forty four seconds for ALPHA616, Jerry."
What was presumably Jerry's head popped out from behind a large computer display.
"Whoa," he said in surprise," is that even possible?"
"I'm looking at the IO data right now. It's already done it, and it figured out everything," enthused Derek, a huge grin on his face.
Jerry walked over and leaned over Derek's shoulder to look at the monitor. In the corner was a small view of the running program showing ALPHA616 looking around now that the dialog box had disappeared. Other windows show lots of indecipherable data and program code, but there is one that shows the results of this most recent iteration of the program. It appeared to be a list and each one had a green check mark next to them.
"We need to get Dr. Farber in here now," said Jerry, his tone suddenly serious.
"Oh, hell yeah," Derek barked, clapping his hands.
"It's clear from this initial data that this particular instantiation of the AI core has passed the first test."
The best Science Fiction is on TV right now
Science fiction has been on a downturn over the last decade. Sure, we get event movies a few times a year, but a lot of that audience has been taken over by tales of comic book heroes. Marvel is a hugely dominating force in film these days, but the real core audience for science fiction used to be found on the small screen. Science fiction fans demand longer, more complex stories, deeper character development, and to have their thoughts poked. Star Trek is most commonly trotted out as prime exemplar.
Aside from the original series which was ended prematurely, there have been five other series, the animated one most people don't recall, three huge series with seven year runs, and one aborted attempt at going back in time that ran for only four seasons. If you look beyond Trek, however, you see that TV used to be riddled with all manner of scifi shows. Space 1999, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, The Wild, Wild West (one of my personal faves that started in Black & White), and more recently Futurama, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, Andromeda, the much loved Quantum Leap, the even more loved Firefly, Sliders, the amazing run of Dr. Who, Babylon 5, and that magnum opus, the new Battlestar Gallactica.
Then something happened, and science fiction seemed to become less important to TV producers. Sure, there were the periodic stabs at it, but TV became a police drama/reality show wasteland. Even SyFy, that staunch stalwart of science fiction, wasn't producing as many series as it was running more horror-based content and live action shows that just weren't interesting.
But then things started to pick up.
A few years ago we got the phenomenally quirky and dark Orphan Black, the very dark re-imagining of the classic The Twilight Zone called Black Mirror, the look at the what it means to be good that is Dark Matter, and the perfectly cast Killjoys. These are all really good science fiction shows, but each of them lack something; that one thing that would make them great. Like The Expanse.
I'll let the Wikipedia entry explain the plot, or at least as much as you're going to get:
Two hundred years in the future, in a fully colonized Solar System, police detective Josephus Miller (Thomas Jane), born in the asteroid belt, is given the assignment to find a missing young woman, Julie Mao (Florence Faivre). Meanwhile, James Holden (Steven Strait), the Executive Officer of the ice trawler Canterbury, is involved in a tragic incident that threatens to destabilize Earth, Mars and the Belt. Far away from their struggles in space, Chrisjen Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo), a United Nations executive, works to prevent war between Earth and Mars by any means necessary. Soon, the three find out that the missing woman and the ice trawler's fate are part of a vast conspiracy that threatens all humanity.
Watch in the opening moments of the first episode when you see Julie Mao's hair floating as if in real zero gravity (you'll find out who she is later). If you think they blew their budget on some sweet effects simply to make the first episode more compelling, you will be pleasantly surprised. From a purely pragmatic standpoint, the set work and effects are mostly top notch. Much of what you see in the series would find itself more at home in movie theaters, not TV screens.
The series is tight, unpleasant, unforgiving, brutal, and shatters your calm as you watch. It is as distressing and engaging to watch as mobster dramas. The violence, the language, the abidingly deep lack of care for human life rips at your soul. You want them all to go back home, knowing in the end that they can never step foot on Earth again, more likely to die in the vacuum of space or at the hands of killers. The glaring eye of the camera gazes unflinchingly at the characters on screen as their animal urge to survive at any cost is tested again and again. Death is around every corner.
The Expanse is not Star Trek. It's not Star Wars or Dune or even the more recent iteration of Battlestar Galactica. There are no heroes or angels. There are no good guys and everyone has the spark of badness in their darkened souls. This is a dirty, hurt, and torn Solar System, touched and corrupted by the corrosive hands of mankind.
Welcome to The Expanse.
There is only one option. Vote.
I've been struggling against the Right for months now, and I'm already feeling burnt out by all the hate and subterfuge. While it would be enormously fulfilling to me to find my words having an affect on a single, solitary conservative, I am convinced that day will not come. If I might use a regional metaphor, we are the coast of Southern California fighting against The Wedge of the Right Wing. The Pacific may be vast, but those who spend their entire days railing against positive human progress are the most entrenched of radicals. They will never be turned, but... you might find this amazing, they don't need to turn.
We simply need to vote.
It doesn't matter what the issues are, who the candidates are, which side you're on, what you believe, where you are from, whether you're a veteran, were born here, or became a citizen after immigrating. It is our right, our duty, as citizens of the United States of America, to vote for our government. It is our duty to determine the path of our country and who should lead us there to make it happen. The only thing that matters is that we do it as a nation, together, regardless of ideology or where we land on the spectrum.
We simply need to vote.
Right now, our country is represented by a small percentage of Americans, and those interests don't necessarily reflect the interests of America as a whole. In reality, we don't even know what America wants. Little more than half of us vote to select a President, and the turnout is far smaller in the mid-terms. That means roughly 40-60% of America decides what America looks like, how criminals are treated, what happens to big corporations when they break the law, how poor people are helped, how much workers should be paid, what taxes are fair, who we go to war with, and much more. If we want those things to change...
We simply need to vote.
From here on out, that's all I'm going to talk about in relation to politics. I may personally support Bernie and hope and pray that our country just gives a damn about people again sometime soon, but for purposes of politics, I will remain neutral. My aim, my goal, my aspiration is to simply get people to vote. I don't care what party you align with, your politics or beliefs or associations. I just care that you go to the polls this November 8th and vote. Vote for your country. Vote for your conscience. Vote for your family and friends. Vote for a better world, whatever that might be.
It only takes an hour or two every two years.
Dwelling inside the persistent shadow of creativity
I am a writer.
This is what I do. For a living. Well, not so much lately, but it's the single most salient job I identify with. Back when I was a kid, being introduced to new stuff like Brave New World and Dune and Catcher in the Rye, I fell madly in love with the idea of becoming a writer.
It didn't take long to discover that it wasn't going to be easy.
In fact, it wasn't until 1996, when I was a mere 27 years old, that I started writing professionally. It was work, not something I wanted from writing. With my new wife, before our daughter was born, I edited and updated technical books for a publisher named Sybex. The imprint still exists, but the company is long gone, absorbed into another, larger publishing group. I've always like technology and was good with it, but it wasn't what I wanted to write.
It wasn't science fiction.
My heart sang when treated to the works of Isaac Asimov. I wanted to write about the life of mankind through the filter of a possible future. I wanted to examine artificial intelligence and fear and desire and pain and joy through the lenses of distant stars. I wanted my words, my ideas, to be cherished by someone, anyone else.
Writing as a job didn't work out so much. The computer book publishing industry kinda tanked and consolidation changed things, and not for the better. It became harder and harder to secure editing work, and none of my books ideas were gaining traction. My agent wasn't very helpful, either. She didn't believe that the Blackberry was going to be worth the effort anymore or that small business owners would want to bother learning about how IT people work (I'm still working on the latter, albeit slowly). Lo and behold, Blackberry has a hit with its new Priv handset running Android. It just goes to show that it doesn't matter if you're right if you don't have enough influence.
Eventually, I actually wrote a complete book, all by my lonesome; Getting An IT Help Desk Job For Dummies. It was published last year and hasn't done well. That said, I think it's a pretty damn good book, and I'm pretty hard on myself when it comes to self-review. Sometimes, I think back to when I was writing that book and realize that I wrote 99.8% of those 288 pages (the rest is just filler from Wiley). Those are all my words, which represent my personal experience and observations about the IT industry from 20+ years of being a consultant, engineer, and writer. It was the second book in the series, as well, and it should have been promoted better, but it wasn't.
Que sera, sera, or as the kids say it today, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don't have a unified, clerical definition about the state of the writer in America these days. I just know that I always feel as if I'm living under an enormous shadow. I am shaded by those who have come before me, and I wither. The collective accomplishment of these men and women greater than I am resilient is a terrible burden for one to carry, especially for me. Those aren't issues to talk about in public, though. Everyone's had a difficult family life in some fashion. I'll freely allow you to let your imagination go wild.
So I keep slogging along. I have two books of fiction I am working on now, and I haven't touched them in months. One would be my first novel and the other is a collection of short stories I had written and writing now. I assigned myself a deadline for last year, and I missed it. It's not the same doing it to yourself as it is having a living, breathing editor huffing down your neck.
So, in the meantime, I write here. I can't even write on my actual blog anymore. It feels like a time capsule of shame and failure, and it has my name plastered all over it. Maybe I will go back to writing there, but for now I'm going to do the deed here.
Posthaven, indeed. LOLZ.
Linux, as a desktop, missed its window of opportunity
Don't troll me, bro. I'm no Linux hater. I used Linux for years. I started with Caldera back when we didn't know that SCO was evil. Despite lacking coding skills of any kind, I hand-crafted my system from the ground up. At that time I was so tired of Windows that I ran Windows apps from a server to my desktop machine just so I could use Linux as my daily driver.
Linux is a fantastic OS. It's powerful, capable, efficient, and dynamic. You can make it do anything you want, as long you A) have the nerd chops and B) you don't work a job which requires mainstream applications. There are the standard arguments, though. Linux has plenty of apps that are like Photoshop/Microsoft Word/whatever. Linux has peerless security. Linux is more reliable. Linux is a lot of things, and most of them are good, but it's no bed of roses.
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Linux is also a terrible OS. It's complex, confusing, chaotic, and cryptic. If you are lucky enough to have an arrangement of chips inside your computer that are compatible with the one of hundreds of Linux distributions you selected, you might just get it installed the first time around, and forget it if you want to get it on a laptop or have a UEFI BIOS. Installing apps is also a crapshoot. Ubuntu has an app store, but it doesn't offer everything and has serious reliability issues. You might want to settle in and learn about make and tarballs. It's gonna be a long month. Security is fine, but it's no better than Mac OS X, which uses a similar foundation for security. Besides, security is only as hard as the user is willing to make it, and most average users don't care to be bothered. As for reliability, that gap has closed. I'm using Windows 10 preview on the Fast Ring and I rarely crash or have to restart, and Macs are legendary for their reliability.
Linux just isn't the panacea the diehards would have us believe.
I know that makes it sound like I'm not a fan, but I am. In fact, I've been a fan for much longer than most, and I'm not even a coder, so I don't have the skills to hack Linux into my perfect OS. Yet, despite these limitations, I learned enough to shape and mold it enough. I still check out the new releases of Ubuntu and follow Ubuntu Touch development. Whenever I see a new piece about Linux in my news feeds, I generally read it.
I'd like to think that this is just a thing, if you know what I mean. The alternative is to suggest that the Open Source model just doesn't work as well as many had hoped. As disturbing as that might sound, it might be true. There are hundreds of distributions (kind of like brands, for the uninitiated) of Linux, but only a precious few can be counted among the known. Ubuntu is the one at the top of the recognition heap, and its the one most people gravitate towards. Mint is popular, as is Fedora, Red Hat's entry. These have even overshadowed their progenitors, Debian and Red Hat itself.
The reason that this dynamic exists is because Ubuntu is developed with a solid ethic and on a regular schedule that can be counted on like a good, solid Timex watch. Ubuntu also rolls out their Long Term Support editions every few years, as well. The LTS is designed for business, and to sell Canonical support plans, which is where most of the revenue to make Ubuntu comes from. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this at all. It's a perfectly sensible and ethical business model, but it's important to know that there's a company behind the generosity and freedom of Ubuntu.
But it doesn't matter. Canonical is a large company that makes a good amount of revenue, but they have still failed to make Ubuntu and household name or even crack significant desktop installation statistics. If that wasn't bad enough, the trends have been clearly indicating that desktop is dropping in popularity. Numbers show that most Millennials spend the bulk of their time on the internet via their phones, a primary driver of the Phablet market. Even the elderly who use smartphones will check Facebook on the small screen three out of every five times. With Linux only being represented on mobile devices by Google's abysmal Android OS, that fact doesn't lend a lot of credence to the idea that Linux is about to break through.
Then there's the App Economy. Apple and Google have carved out enormous, billion dollar markets for apps in their respective markets, and people overwhelmingly find apps a more appealing way to access their increasingly internet-based apps. So much is moving to the App model and run in the Cloud that desktops are becoming a burden. I have 23 apps on my Windows 10 taskbar, 15 of which are Google Chrome "Apps" (meaning they just run in their own browser window). The rest are desktop apps that access online services, all except Steam, which is an online system that supports my desktop-only PC games.
You can do the same thing with Linux, but then you'll be faced with all of the unknowable challenges of getting it installed, learning how to use it, figuring out how to work around the lack of tools you are used to, and even things like how to get it connected to a wireless network, which can be oddly complex, depending on which Window Manager you select. A little hint; my fave WM is Xfce, but if you are a noob, don't bother. Just go with Ubuntu or Mint Cinnamon.
Once you're done, though, I think that you'll soon find that Linux really isn't a great replacement for Windows 7.