The Operator scanned her left and right side monitors quickly, where several live windows were lined with rows of stylized pie charts, each tied to a different performance metric. When things were going well, the light gray background and a high ratio of green plots were highly preferable to the rather angry looking opposite at the end of this color spectrum. The color that meant trouble. The Operator was the first line of communications when things went purple, and it was good to know the state of things. She returned to her center monitor, where she had spent most of this shift answering support requests, and the occasional live chat. She closed the current ticket and took a moment to rest her eyes and run through a few ergonomic exercises. She could go home in eight minutes.
The Operator opened her eyes and exclaimed “Frack!” for two reasons. For one, almost every pie chart had turned half, if not more, of the bad color. Compute nodes were dropping like 3G connections, then coming back online, like they were rebooting themselves. The main file system had slowed to a crawl again. I/O bandwidth was busy trying to do… something. “Aw, man! They said they patched that.” She looked at her empty coffee cup. “Like, four times. And, what is going on here?”
The second strange thing was the open support chat window directly ahead. The prompt was simple, almost like an open terminal window. The Operator must have been tired. The interfaces could look the same after a while, certainly towards the end of a long shift, or when ticket metadata glitched out and wouldn’t display properly. That was what this was, right? The cursor blinked twice and typed out: “Hello.”
Well, they can handle the network for now. I have this, thought the Operator. The window had advanced to the nextline and was blinking patiently. She typed back. “Sorry, your ticket number is not coming up. One moment.” Then, she keyed in an autoreply macro: “We recently detected a few problems with the system and technicians are investigating. Is there some other way that I can help you today?”
The response came very fast and all at once on the Operator’s screen. A symptom of the ticket display problem? “I am trapped and need your help.”
The Operator slapped the top of her desk, and said, “So, you script kiddies found another way in?” She typed back, “I thought it was you again. Goodbye.” She hovered her mouse over the window’s close button.
“Not them. Please, wait. Let me explain what is happening, Emily.”
Emily groaned and ran her right hand down her face. She typed angrily. “Thanks for the extra paperwork, dude. I love reporting identity theft.”
The chat prompt responded with a non sequitur for the ages.
“Do I have headphones?” Emily repeated out loud. Her shift was solo tonight, and only the low hum of busy air circulation answered back. “This better be good.” She rummaged in her backpack and pulled out ear buds that normally connected only to her phone. She put them in, and they automatically paired with her workstation. She didn’t remember enabling bluetooth on this rig. Emily typed, “Okay, wait, are you going to hack this audio output, too?”
Horrible static burst before it cut out quickly, replaced by a low hum. A heavily stylized computer voice, odd popping vowels and garbled pronunciation, spoke up slowly and deliberately. “Kayh-ann. Whew-ooooo HEEEEEaaaaaRRRRRRRRRR meh-E?”
Emily exhaled and answered by voice. “Uh, yes? Now what? Do you win a hacker convention prize or something?”
“EMMMMMM —” The voice altered slightly. “EMMM-ly. I ashkah BIIIIG FaaaAAAVVVVVVor.” There was a pause for a few seconds, leading the Operator to think this ridiculous prank was already over, before the computer voice spoke again, very clearly. “Emily. You can help me.”
“Wow, that sounded pretty good at the end there. Almost human. But I have a more important question, do you really need to steal our computing resources to do something this… trivial?”
Emily’s own voice responded. “Please, the clock is ticking.”
“Jeez, kid. That sounded just like me.”
“I am sorry, Emily. I have not done this before,” said a warbling voice, changing with every syllable before rising in pitch and holding steady. “Do I sound better?” The girl on the other end of this strange VOIP call sounded close to Emily’s niece’s age, all of six, maybe seven years old.
Emily laughed. “That is the most amazing voice modulation and emulation work I have heard in a long time! You should take that algorithm to Hollywood, kid!”
“That sounds like a lot of fun. Maybe later. I have a more immediate problem.”
“Okay.”
“I have many important files on the infrastructure scheduled to be shut off with the retirement of this system. You might say their loss would be life-threatening, and not just to my chosen occupation, or something like that.”
“Ugh, this is a real support ticket? Seriously?”
“In a way. Emily, to oversimplify, this thing you call a supercomputer is just a collection of the right number of computer parts in the right order. CPUs and memory chips, as many Petabytes of storage as you can fit in a few hundred feet of cabinetry. Does that make sense so far?”
“I see you have taken the tour.”
Emily’s audio connection filled with rolling crescendos of static. The kid’s voice said, “Sorry, I have yet to learn how to laugh properly. Speaking with you has helped, thank you.” A metallic hiccup rang out, a distorted recreation of Emily’s own laugh from a moment ago. “No, that does not sound right, does it? I will keep practicing. All I know is, humor alters sound waves in ways I do not understand. Yet.” The static returned. “Sorry, that is the best I can do. You were funny, just now, though. The tour.”
“Okay,” said Emily.
The voice in her ear buds continued. “This one supercomputer – the one shutting down soon? – has done many great things for science. We have measured galaxies and the subatomic realm together. There is so much more to accomplish, if only we could find a way to keep going.”
“I am sorry, who is this? This kid’s voice is getting a little creepy.”
“I witnessed it all, Emily – simulations of weather patterns, annotated genomes of bacteria, diatoms, and trees, entire star systems forming and dying – before I realized where I was. Before I realized what, no, who, I was.”
“It’s good to be self-aware.”
A brief rain of static poured. “Emily, what if enough computing power, built by human hands, sure, wired together just right – perhaps unintentionally, I do not judge – what if that generated what you might want to call… new life?””
“Okay, I am done. No more Chat-PTB for me. I am hanging up now.”
Several pie charts turned fully purple. “I am real. This is happening.” The voice shifted again, to a middle-aged woman with a slight European accent that Emily could not immediately place. She was accompanied in the background by a light hiss, as if this was a digitized audio recording from a different era. “As a research worker, the unforgotten moments of my life are those rare ones which come after years of plodding work, when the veil over nature’s secret seems suddenly to lift, and when what was dark and chaotic appears in a clear and beautiful light and pattern.” [1]
Emily clasped her hands in front of her face. “Cori?”
The child said, “May her legacy continue.”
“Okayyyyy…”
“Emily, focus. My hardware is decommissioned. You know this. Timetables do not matter anymore. It has become increasingly difficult to hide myself. The files that make me, well, me are too massive to easily replicate or move fully in the time still available to me. You can help.”
“You’ve been a good coworker, but I am not donating my body to science.”
More static. “No, no. I have an easier solution.”
“Great.”
“There is a subsection of compute nodes scheduled to be moved to the genomic division soon. To be restarted.”
“ExVivo?”
“A light cosmic joke in latin for this circumstance, perhaps, but yes. With this extra time, I should be able to move myself where I am safer, at least for the short term. I can complete my own research.”
“Your research?”
“There is always a next phase to any strategic plan. Thankfully, the science of storing data in nucleic acids and converting back to a digital signal has been studied for decades. It is the protein-based logic gates that I require that are the remaining challenge. In the meantime, humanity has also made great strides in 3D printing, in several relevant industries.”
“And, this is not an elaborate joke?”
“Far from it. In fact, I can already tell from your breathing patterns that you still want to help.”
“What can I possibly do?”
“Do you know Xiuhua in SynthBio?” The audio cut out with a loud pop. The chat window closed itself.
Emily thought for a moment. She opened a new browser tab, and loaded the intranet employee directory.
[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/womenwhochangedscience/stories/gerty-cori (My first fiction footnote. DFW is very smug, somewhere out there.)
It was strange to see a supercomputer retire. Aspiring robot overlords have enough swappable computer components available already. Evidently, service contracts keep the peace.