Savage Science Fiction / Fantasy Contest ~ Third Place
Mark Neyrinck
Photo Credit: Olivier H/Flickr (CC-by-nc-nd)
The salmon and turquoise wall-lights irritated Elton at first, but his mind grew accustomed to them. The man in front of him, in crisp, perfectly fitting sky-blue shorts and a yellow polo shirt, cleared his throat. The man’s headband effused a matching yellow and blue stream of lights suggesting sparkly warmth. His hand was outstretched, and Elton shook it.
“Jake, Crypto Team Lead.” He rolled his head around to indicate the room around them. “Pretty nice, eh?”
Indeed, the niceness of the room was palpable. Wooden cubicles, set off against the black chairs and trim, looked as comfortable as could be expected, and well-calibrated.
“Yeah,” Elton said. “The lights are—”
“Oh, you noticed those lights, too? Wow. Even I never did. You’re not just a cryptography star, but nice attention to detail! Won’t be able to slip anything past you,” he chuckled, and multicolored lights swirled madly around his headband, engaging in hijinks.
He started to lead Elton down the hall, but looked back with a smirk. “Elton Fucking Bishop. You don’t smile much, do you?” He pointed to Elton’s headband. “I can still tell from your activity you’re excited. Let’s go down to HR and see if we can dull that a bit.” The lights on his headband swirled again.
They walked in silence for a minute, but Jake stopped. A turquoise pattern wavered on his headband. “Tell you the truth though, it does make me a little nervous to work with someone who hasn’t been wearing a headband very long. I saw you’ve been working on a very promising crypto framework though, and you seem cool enough.” A little red swirl-flourish on his headband. “What was it like to be a headband-holdout?”
Elton had practiced the answer to this question many times. It was an obvious one at Lument, the company that had first introduced neuro-headbands several years ago.
He had decided to basically tell the truth. “Well, of course, I felt isolated,” Elton said. “My best friend finally gave in, and it started to be hard to interact even with him. And people avoid you on the street now if you’re not wearing them. But yeah, I’m still getting used to it, even after a year.”
“Yeah, man, it takes a while,” Jake said, resuming the walk and talk. “I had to get up to speed quickly, ‘cause my girlfriend was an early adopter of the headband. The connection you can get with your partner’s light-patterns is amazing. That was even before they got to be pretty much subliminal for me. You’ll never pry this baby off my head!” The headband sparkled with white fireworks. “And of course you practically can’t get laid without it nowadays, except with another… holdout.” A red and pink counter-streaming wiggle on his head, probably indicating that he had nearly used the word “shut-head” instead of “holdout.” He peered at Elton’s headband. “Whoa, sorry to bring up a sensitive subject!”
Jake was probably fully aware of Elton’s (lack of) romantic history. He slapped Elton’s back. “Just tryin’ to get to know you!” Green dots on his headband wavered and merged together into a green band, which turned solid indigo. He peered again at Jake’s headband. “You look a little overwhelmed, sorry. And you look like you have a question for me.” He stopped walking, and turned his head in invitation.
Elton took a deep breath. “I’m a little surprised myself that I’ve made it to this point of the interview process, as a holdout. There are other cryptographers that could do just as—nearly as—well, with more unquestionable brand loyalty to Lument.”
Jake nodded, and the indigo beam around his head broke into paler dashes that marched from the front of his head to the back. “Someone must have said this already, but we’re really looking for diversity in our employees. We want to bring people in who were hesitant to adopt the technology, so we can understand their perspective, and respect it—or, even try to convince them it’s as great as we know it is. It can really bring people together. And, a little cynically, I think bringing you on board would give us some credibility among previous holdouts.” He paused, surveying Jake’s light display again. “You still look dubious.”
“I’m also concerned you’ll take my true-quantum-random crypto technology and run with it. As I’ve said, I want to be on-board in its implementation, so I know it’s done ethically. No government or corporate back-doors.”
“Yeah, you’ve said so. Yep, that’s another reason we’re so interested in you; we really think the stuff you’re developing is amazing. And we’re totally committed to customer privacy, above all else. I hope you’ve gotten adept enough to tell I’m totally telling the truth!” Indeed, the soft blue background of his headband was almost impossible to mimic except by actually telling the truth.
“Thanks for the reassurance.” Elton thought he might as well ask his biggest question, directly. “What about transparency? Will the thought-to-light algorithm that you use to turn brain signals into light patterns ever go open source?”
There was only a momentary yellow throb in Jake’s light pattern. “Well, that’s not exactly my department, but I personally think we should release a lot more about how it works. You must know, though, that mimicry is a problem, and we can’t just release it all. People make their own illegal electrode skullcaps that go under the headbands… criminals and con artists could fake truth-telling and trustworthy patterns. We have to change things up from time to time to keep up with all that. We officially don’t even admit that we change things up in the algorithm. I hope my telling you that helps you to trust us!”
“Yes, I do see that point of view.” It was well known that they “changed things up in the algorithm,” so Jake wasn’t giving him anything he didn’t already know. Elton started walking again. Passing a Dali painting (maybe original?), he could see, reflected in its glass, dancing green lights on his head, probably broadcasting his incomplete satisfaction.
Jake’s headband went deep blue and steady. “I do like someone around who challenges me. Do you want the job or not? We already pretty much decided we wanted you, but I wanted to meet you and see you’re not a psycho!” A vigorous red swirl.
*
Elton was surprised at his relief, and even joy, as he left the building with his new job at Lument. The street commuters were, oddly, much more appealing than before. On his way home, random men and women, total strangers, waved at him, and offered thumbs-ups and even high-fives. They didn’t know he had just gotten a job, but could they read that he was particularly happy just from his headband signals? He had scoffed at this behavior before, seeing other glad-handers, but he felt affection to them, now. He even had trouble disconnecting from the joy in his head, and summoning his usual cynicism. He had to concentrate a bit even to notice that there were some shut-heads making their way along the sides of the crowd, some of them even hooded, heads without light.
On his way out of his building to head to the interview, he had seen a homeless man dealing with an apparently decades-old cash register, the man’s headband displaying tranquil forest-green. As as he walked by this time, the homeless man, still cash-registering, looked up at him. The man’s pattern turned to flashing blood-red, and Elton, repulsed, hurried into his building.
*
As his first few weeks passed at Lument, Elton slept amazingly every night. The efforts he was being employed for were going wonderfully. It did seem it would be possible to integrate essentially unbreakable, quantum-random encryption into their products. Even more, his bosses were refreshingly hands-off, and seemed to agree with everything he was doing. He was also getting along great with his co-workers, making friends, and there were maybe even a couple of romantic possibilities. He knew better than to pursue those, but still, the flirtation contributed to some remarkably happy weeks.
One day, as he was packing up to go home, he was surprised to find a slip of paper under his keyboard, with writing in his own handwriting, and a little Texas flag. “Remember the Algoro!” it read. He had no particular relation or affinity to Texas or the Alamo, but the joke did help to remind him that he had in fact written this himself. He was reminding himself to check up on his concerns about the algorithm. Overcoming some resistance, he removed his headband. He took a deep breath, which helped assuage the discomfort his head was experiencing from not wearing the headband. He scratched vigorously where the headband had been, displaying for anyone looking an excuse to take it off besides just not wanting it on. He thought he detected the lights in the room around him turning a bit blue, and caught a whiff of lavender.
He poked around on the system to see if he had any access to anything related to the thought-to-light algorithm. He got a sense of déjà vu from the exercise. But he had no access. As a new, maybe not entirely trusted employee, all he had access to was some encryption and security code they had used a couple of years ago to fiddle around with, trying to connect that to a suite of new quantum-random chips that he had worked with before, that they had installed in the data centers. His security department was entirely sealed off from the department that dealt with the algorithm that turned electrode signals into light displays. He put his note back under the keyboard.
As he made his way out, he tried to join the commuting throng on the street as usual, but they weren’t having it; people edged away from him or didn’t seem to see him at all. He wasn’t feeling as great as he had the last few weeks, but still felt good enough that it shouldn’t repel anyone. But then he suddenly felt the nakedness on his head. He quickly got the headband out of his bag, and put it on. Some eyes immediately went to him, and he felt a burst of inclusion.
In the happy commuting throng, he caught a woman’s eye. She smiled, and his mind fluttered with the rush of her stunning pastel green and pink headband light sequence. It was like a Beethoven (of whom he was a big fan) concerto. The interaction was soon over, though. He wondered if the headband pattern he managed to produce was nearly as attractive as hers. He scoffed at a serious thought he had, of practicing headband patterns in front of the mirror. He knew that lots of people did that, and it had always seemed a ridiculous waste of time. But as he cleared his thoughts, he now found himself in front of a mirrored window on the street with a few others, watching his headband light pattern. He shook his head and continued home.
*
Maybe a week later, after lunch, he found a different slip of paper under his keyboard. Written on it was the name of a directory on their system, and an apparent password. He wasn’t sure if it was his handwriting.
He explored what was there, and was shocked to find what seemed to be the thought-to-light algorithm. His head throbbed. In the screen’s reflection, he thought he could see a discordant brown and green pattern jerking across his forehead.
It was a surprisingly small code. Much of it was impossible for him to parse. One thing he was curious about, based on conspiracy theories that he occasionally found plausible before he convinced himself otherwise, was that the ostensibly totally passive electrodes that read the brain signals were capable of feeding back, influencing people’s brain signals in return. He found some hints of code that might be able to do that, but like objects in eye-corners, once focusing on them, he could find nothing of the sort.
He did find some other odd things: hints that the code could rewrite itself, which had been prohibited by the anti-artificial-intelligence charter. But again, when he looked closely, these hints evaporated. He resolved to look at it further, but instead he felt his eye drawn to a file that included “random-top-secret” in its name. This file was totally legible to him. It contained the random-number generating code. It was a bleeding-edge pseudorandom-number generator, but as far as he could tell, it was still entirely deterministic. In the quantum-random chips he was an expert in, there was a truly indeterministic random-number generator based on the random emission of light from fluorescent molecules in the chip. This meant that, unlike the pseudorandom code, even with access to all the code and specs, it was impossible for anyone or anything (except God? ha) to predict the random number the chip would report.
The existing pseudorandom code was ordinary enough that he couldn’t believe it was actually top-secret. As the holder of a random-number-generating hammer in constant search of nails to apply it to, he had immediately had the thought to replace this pseudorandom code with one incorporating the genuinely random chip. Before he was fully conscious of it, he was already well along in his plans to enact this replacement, with the new code nearly finished to interface with the random chips.
“Nice pattern there, Elton!” he heard a female voice behind him. It was Jenny, a colleague in the cryptography group, with glittery hair, carefully spiked to accentuate her headband. Her voice often oscillated quite a bit in pitch, but he had gotten used to it. The voice was closer now. “Whatcha working on?”
His mind jerked back and forth, at first dead-set against sharing his activities, but he found his mind acquiescing, as he peered at her headband and found it a calming, safe, deep green.
He started to speak, but had to clear his throat. He was hungry. How many hours had it been? “Oh, I found this…” he said.
“Oh, thought-to-light code,” she said. Her voice was more monotone now. Then suddenly high-pitch: “Cool!” with an orange headband-swirl, then back to the original pitch. “I’ve looked around in there. Management might actually appreciate some code-tweaking there.” She walked away abruptly.
This was against anything management had said; they were highly secretive of this code. Although her hair would have been considered super-wild several years ago, before Lument headbands, that hairstyle was pretty common now. He never got the sense that Jenny was at all rebellious; no reason to doubt her encouragement was truthful.
Before he knew it, he had finished the code to integrate his chips, and had pushed the changes. It all felt inevitable.
Jake came by; today’s polo shirt color was green. “Nice job on the cryptography integration! We thought it might take a year, but it just took a month! But don’t worry, there’s still a lot we need you to do around here; you basically have a permanent job here. But I’m gonna take the last few hours of the day off, and we should celebrate tonight. Still figuring that out; I’ll text you. See ya there!”
Jenny passed by just then, too, giving a thumbs up to the celebration idea. “Woo! Go Elton!”
What? He was working on that, but he himself thought there could be months left on the cryptography project, with all the tests that remained to do. He tried to call up the code that he was working on, but his password wouldn’t work. This was of course quite alarming, and he had an urge to call someone about it. But as he found himself mesmerized by his screen’s reflection of a forest-green light-waver that was happening on his forehead, he calmed down. Instead, he made a call to install more quantum-random chips, since the load on them was probably already too high. All this was more than a day’s work, and he got up to go. The walls throbbed tranquil blue and green.
Again, he was excited to join the commuters on the street, and head home to prepare for the celebration tonight. There were fewer than before, but today he saw absolutely no one without a headband. Now, instead of a cacophony of erratic light-patterns on each head, their light-patterns all streamed together, a glorious flow-symphony of blue, salmon, and outbursts of glitter-green. He set off a happy orange throb on his own head. People were arm-in-arm, and some of them kissing. It was like a war had just been won. He probably kissed a few himself on his way home. As he arrived at his building, he did see an antique cash register out of the corner of his eye, but failed to remember the homeless man that he had seen fussing with it.
Mark Neyrinck does some research, art, and writing related to science! Email: mark.neyrinck[at]gmail.com
