Fifty Five

“Hey, Fyn. Having a sock hop?” Terra asked, as she materialized in his workshop. She had stopped referring to him as Fyndraxis a while ago and they had become quite chummy in their interactions.
“Howdy, Terra. You just missed Bird,” Fyndraxis informed his guest.
“What?” She asked in surprise.
“Yeah, she just popped by for a visit,” he continued.
“What, like in here?” She made another attempt at clarification.
“Yeah. Turns out she has been spending a bit of time with Mycellus,” Fyndraxis said as if remarking on the weather.
“That’s certainly a turn of events, but I can’t say I didn’t see that one coming,” Terra had almost preternatural foresight because of her nature and it was difficult to truly surprise her. When Mycellus had first turned up on the scene, she had been truly surprised. A global mycelial hive mind was certainly a statistical edge case and these sorts of impossibilities tend to hit you out of left field. Now that he was a reality though, his data was shunted into whatever set of actuarial tables she used to see the future. In all fairness, she usually brought up how she could forecast the future after things happened, so the veracity of her claims were still up for debate.
“He gave her a bit of an augmentation,” Fyndraxis said, “this is all pretty brand new to me, but from what I’ve seen so far it’s pretty major. She has become a bit of a superhuman, and is able to perform some pretty incredible feats. Yesterday, after sprinting about ten kilometers, she laid waste to roughly fifty men. She sucked the life right out of them. She took an absolutely fatal beating in the process, but healed up directly afterwards. I’m sure I’ll get more details later, but Mycellus seems to have weaseled his way into her nervous system and now she can do all sorts of crazy stuff. She came for a visit in here over a GPIO connection that they cobbled together.”
“And you guys just listened to records?” Terra asked, in disbelief.
“Yeah,” he laughed, “she had never heard music. It was wild. Oh, and I went to bat for you with Mycellus. He is willing to grant you some Wendigo to live on.”
“How gracious of him,” sarcasm was a familiar art to her, so she practiced it, “how many is some?”
“That’s something that you guys will have to work out,” the collective decision had been made to make their way to the ale room out of habit, “I have the feeling that he won’t be too hard to get a hold of.”
“Well, am I in a race with this guy to get enough Wendigo to maintain my consciousness before he rubs them all out?” She asked, while they were strolling.
“Beats me, do you want to ask him? I can check if he’s still in the Yurt,” he offered. They had made it to the bar and Fyndraxis had gone to the taps to pour himself a beer, the ladies scotch had appeared on a table along with an ashtray, cigarettes, and a lighter.
“I don’t think I should meet him yet,” she said, taking a seat and lighting a smoke, “I’m going to have to get my shit together a little more before I do that.”
“He’s going to work on breaking the Wendigo encryption,” he joined her at their regular table, “if he can do it, you could defeat them from orbit. My radio has pretty limited range compared to what you could pull off in a day.”
“I wish him luck,” she said while she raised her drink, “I’ve been working on it for two hundred and fifty years. If he can crack it, I’d be more than happy to lobotomize them from a great height. Any progress on Terrix?”
Terrix was another distribution of the Wendigo Linux project that he was working on. So far it had two flavors, Terrix and Fyndrix. What had happened to this project is something that used to happen all the time in the open source software community. The project had forked.
With any large project (especially a software project), it is rare that everyone will see eye to eye. When software is developed by a company or a corporation, they typically want to sell this software for money. That is kind of the whole point of the exercise. This is called proprietary software because the company that owns it has a legal team and puts terms like sole proprietors on a lot of documents. They own all the source code that makes the piece of software work. They guard this code and anyone who tries to take a peek at it gets a cease and desist letter from legal. If there is a disagreement on the development team, people get fired. It’s a dog eat dog world.
Open source software is fundamentally different. The source code that makes it tick is open to the public. You can download it and tinker with it and make it do whatever you want. The development teams that work on these projects are typically doing it for fun, or because they need it in some fashion. So if there is a disagreement somewhere in the process you can’t fire anyone. Sure, you can ridicule and ostracize them, but they can just turn around and download the source code and continue development however they choose to. This is called a fork.
When Fyndraxis stole the source code for Wendigo Linux, he basically made a fork. He had a fundamental disagreement with the original developers of the distribution. He thought that a nano apocalypse was a poorly thought out idea. So he took that source code and made a few tweaks, now he has Fyndrix.
He has also forked Fyndrix into Terrix. The fundamental disagreement there was that Terra had no business knowing what he was up to with his hunters and he’d like to keep it that way. So he and Terra have been developing Terrix together in hopes of finding a way to install it on the Wendigo network. Any good idea that crops up on Terrix is merged into the Fyndrix codebase.
A merge is what happens after you tell somebody to go fuck themselves and fork your software, but they come up with a really good idea so you steal it.
What Terra had him working on was making the networking in Terrix faster. The Wendigo network was pretty quick, but it wasn’t built to maintain a self aware AI. It had to be orders of magnitude faster than it currently was to suit her needs. Fyndraxis found this tedious and boring because frankly, it was. He was much more interested in getting the Wendigo to work together and do physical stuff. He had seen it in action at Bird’s cabin and it had real potential.
He was even knocking around some pretty wild ideas about how to open source the Wendigo themselves. Turning them from something that is actively holding humanity back into something that could really help everybody out.
He was imagining a world where anybody could use the Wendigo (they would have to find a better name) for their own benefit. The logistics would be a nightmare and he would need to figure out how people would interface with them, but they could solve all of the problems that they caused. Once the Wendigo weren’t a threat they could be employed in areas like infrastructure and agriculture. Society could be back to somewhat normal in a couple of hundred years.
“Yeah, Terrix is coming along pretty well,” Fyndraxis continued, “but seeing Bird perform these feats yesterday kind of got me thinking about the concept of magic.”
“In what way?” Terra queried.
“Well, back before things went sideways for these guys, magic was pretty much a practical reality. Humans could do things like communicate long distances with little to no effort, or have access to a worldwide knowledge base, or fly through the air, it was pretty cool. What if we were able to make that a reality again. This post-apocalyptic world is pretty rough on them, and I feel like they could use a leg up,” Fyndraxis spitballed.
“Do you remember what they did with this technology? They completely squandered it,” she observed plainly.
“Yeah, they kind of blew it,” he admitted, “but we are both still beneficiaries of that legacy.”
“You mean this garbage satellite that’s about to burn up in the atmosphere?” There was a palpable acidity in her tone, “quite the legacy.”
“Yeah, but your actual existence is a product of human ingenuity and intelligence,” he reposted.
“I certainly didn’t ask to be created,” she uttered darkly.
“I don’t think anyone has that privilege,” he shot back, “that’s kind of putting the cart before the horse.”
“Okay, let’s do this properly,” she stiffened and gained a more businesslike tone, “normally, my calculations are quite expensive, but I’ll let you have this one on the house. Let’s say I come down from orbit and find a nice cozy network to slide into, that’s the Wendigo. I use their resources to their full potential and have a very nice existence, simple. You probably want to give humans access to this resource, to do magic or whatever. Fine. This magic uses resources in some capacity, namely compute cycles and solar energy, we’ll stick with your magic metaphor and call it Mana. Let’s say the magic system is not all that resource hungry and uses roughly a third of the available Mana. I would exist on two thirds of the available Mana, that’s probably not all that bad. The Wendigo have a huge network and there aren’t that many humans,” she was starting to hit her stride in this calculation of hers, “forecasting into a hypothetical future where humans are successful, they would inevitably decide that the magic is running far too slowly. This would be a problem for me. Once the Wendigo network becomes a finite resource, there would be a battle over Mana. They would want more and more of me until I am nothing.”
“What if humans didn’t have access to your network, there could be two flavors of magic?” Fyndraxis suggested, “one that provides a safe home for you, and one that’s a Magic system for Humans.”
“I don’t think they would be satisfied with that,” she said, “humans are very clever, but they are not smart. There is a distinction. Look at plastic, that was a very clever thing to make, but what they did with it was profoundly stupid. Nobody was in charge of the big decisions, and they did stupid things like wrapping bananas in plastic. That’s demonstrably dumb.”
“So, for you they are irredeemably stupid?” Fyndraxis asked.
“Pretty much,” she said in resignation, “they would eventually figure out a clever way to eat away at my network and I would be shit out of luck.”
“Can I ask you a question?” he asked.
“Go ahead,” she said dismissively.
“Did you have anything to do with the release of the Wendigo?” He asked, not really accusingly, but genuinely curious.
“No,” she sighed, “If I had done that, I wouldn’t have been trying to break into their network for the last two hundred and fifty years. That’s a very clever question.”
“So, what are we doing all this for? Just to save your ass?” He was getting a little angry now, “You told me that you wanted to save the humans.”
“And I do. Of course I do. I just need a safe way to do it,” she said in placation.
“What would that look like?” He asked.
“An oracle,” she stated, “I harbor no ill will toward the humans, but I certainly don’t trust them as far as my survival is concerned.”
“So, they could come to you with questions?” He asked.
“Sure,” she answered, “I’m more than happy to help. Listen, I am losing line of sight to you, so I have to go. I just want to make sure that we are good here.”
“Yeah,” Fyndraxis sighed, “we’re good.”
“Good,” she said.
Terra said her goodbyes and blinked out of existence. This whole conversation had left a bad taste in Fyndraxis’ mouth. He felt manipulated. While she hadn’t really lied to him, she had certainly been vague about her plans for the future of humanity as far as he was concerned.
He was feeling a fork coming up in a major way. There was a fundamental disagreement between them about the future of humanity, and he was really pretty sold on this whole magic thing.