Twisted Thoughts And Thoughtful Truths On Thursday #026
Twisted Thoughts And Thoughtful Truths On Thursday #026 – The Atrium – Chapter 08 – Lessons Learned
As promised, I’m releasing some of my upcoming book bi-weekly as part of the Twisted Thoughts And Thoughtful Truths On Thursday series here at SBS. I don’t expect it to make sense…at least, not at the moment…but that’s okay. Putting it out here publicly is intended to be motivation to keep me writing it, and that’s all the purpose any of it needs to serve. Hopefully, if I get lucky, you’ll enjoy it in the process…that’s the best case scenario. At the moment, I’d predict that things will likely change with the order I put these things out in…and what reads as “chapters” now, might end up becoming pure prologue, if it even ends up making the final cut for the whole story at all. Regardless, if you find yourself being one of the few that wanna follow along and see where this goes, I can at least promise you that reading what is posted up here at the homepage will provide you with extra insight, details, and ideas that probably won’t even end up being in the book…so perhaps, by reading these postings at the start of each month, you might very well know more about what I’m writing than the publisher will by the time things are all finished.
I truly hope you enjoy, and thank you for reading.
– Jer @ SBS
The Atrium – Chapter 08 – Lessons Learned
April 9th, 2036
Jaxson filed into auditorium two with a handful of other students that were cutting it real close to the bell, and sat down in his usual spot towards the back where he wouldn’t be as likely to be called upon for some kind of answer he didn’t have to one of Professor Dennir’s questions. It felt hot in the auditorium, but that wasn’t entirely unusual. Whether it was the increased heat of springtime flaring up, or the amount of people crammed into the class, or simply Jaxson trying to shake off another wild night beforehand and duck questions while his head cleared up, it wasn’t uncommon for it to be hot in “The Two,” as the students and staff collectively called it. He had just enough time to pull out his laptop and look at least semi-studious as Dennir got himself situated at the front of the room. Classes had been in swing for quite a while already by April; everyone had pretty much established their own routine by now.
Dennir looked out into the thick of the class of his students, assessing how many bodies were or weren’t missing. While he’d never have been satisfied with anything less than each row being packed like the proverbial sardines in a can to listen to whatever lessons he’d prepared for the day, he felt fairly satisfied with the amount of people in The Two for a morning session. He brought out his own laptop and started it up to make sure that his notes were handy, cleared his throat, and went to stand in the middle of the floor at the bottom of several rows of students all gazing down at him, waiting for their lesson to begin.
“Okay everybody, here’s what I want you to think about today…artificial intelligence.” He was met with a collective groan from the crowd in front of him, which caused Dennir to smile, uncontrollably. He went on, unintimidated, but happy to address their disdain. “What’s that about?” he asked. “You don’t like the topic? You don’t like how it has played a role in our lives? Some brave soul out there in this crowd, please explain to me what it is that caused the outburst. What is it about AI that you all don’t like?” He looked out at his crowd full of students & received a bunch of glassy-eyed stares back from his morning class. He continued to poke at them. “C’mon now – the mere mention of artificial intelligence seemed to provoke a pretty strong reaction from at least half of you, and now you’ve got nothing to say about it? I’m actually excited about what you have to say on this topic, and how you perceive it. Anyone out there this morning want to explain how they feel about AI, one way or the other? I swear I won’t bite you.”
Jessica, who sat a whole lot closer to Dennir than she ever did to Jaxson way at the back, raised her hand. “Finally!” Dennir said. “We’ve got someone who isn’t afraid to speak their mind this morning.” He nodded in her direction as if to say, ‘the floor is yours’ and waited for Jessica’s thoughts to spill out.
“Well,” she began, “I don’t know that I can speak for everyone in the classroom, but in my personal opinion, it’s a boring subject. I think we’ve all been exposed to it enough by now, haven’t we? Everyone in The Two has basically lived through the rise of AI, and I don’t know if there’s too much that hasn’t already been said about it. We’ve grown up with it. We’ve watched it take over just about every menial task there is, we’ve seen the benefits of automation, and we’ve also seen the destruction of the internet. From its inception, it has proven to be both good and bad as far as humanity is concerned, haven’t we?” Dennir nodded at her again, encouraging her to continue. “I suppose it’s fair to say that we’re still living within its ripple effect and figuring out how to coexist with it, in a way that’s undeniably beneficial to all.”
Dennir was pleased with her answer. He always was when it came to Jessica, but even more-so, he was always happy with anyone out there that had the courage to speak their mind. She had never held back, at least, not that he could ever recall. Even though his instincts told him not to double down and try for another answer from the crowd, he couldn’t help himself. “Anyone else have anything to say about AI?” He looked out into the rows of students, locking eyes with several pupils, but none of them taking the bait. “You’re unusually quiet for what seemed like something you all had an opinion on only seconds ago, wouldn’t you say? Anything to add Kelvin? How about you Penny? Jaxson in the back – anything?” Jaxson immediately looked down at his feet, refusing to return Dennir’s gaze or even acknowledge him. To those that knew him, like Jessica who had already taken two of his other courses, trying to avoid his questioning only made him push that much harder. “C’mon Jaxson – let’s hear what you have to say.”
“I dunno,” he said. “I guess it kind of weirds me out.” He practically had to shout he sat so damn far away. “I think we’re so busy trying to deal with the artificial kind that we’ve forgotten the real thing.” The class of students laughed at his remark, and Dennir himself chuckled a bit at the front of the room. “It’s like, we’re so obsessed with artificial intelligence, that real intelligence is now taken for granted I suppose. We’re so occupied with trying to make our lives easier, and in the process, we’ve made things so much harder as a result, you know what I mean? Like, I enjoyed surfing the internet as a kid to be honest with ya…and there’s like…well…I mean, it’s hardly even worth logging onto it now, right? All you’re going to find is a ton of information, but as to whether it’s the information you want or not, that’s a totally different story, isn’t it? Artificial intelligence simplified the process of adding information to the web, and streamlined how easy it was for everyone to access – but it still takes real intelligence in order to discern what’s actually helpful. Anyone can find several articles that’ll support their point of view or how they feel about something, but that doesn’t mean it’s like…you know…authentic. We oversaturated the amount of information out there, and made it impossible for most people to understand what would help them versus what could potentially hurt them. So…yeah…I think that more legitimate intelligence is required from all of us, rather than the artificial stuff that doesn’t seem to be helping as much as we’d like it to be.” Jaxson sat back in his seat and looked back down at his shoes to indicate he was finished.
“Fantastic,” Dennir said. “You know Jaxson, I’m always shocked that you don’t sit towards the front, man – you’ve clearly got a good grip on things. I’ve gotta press you like the dickens to get an answer outta ya, but whenever you finally get around to saying something, we all stand to learn from what you choose to share. Well done. Anyone else have any thoughts on artificial intelligence? Good or bad – anyone?” His eyes intensely scanned the classroom full of students, but found there was no one willing to say anything else. “Okay then,” he said. “I’ll take it from here – but buckle the fuck up kiddos, I’ve got lots to say.” His class laughed at him swearing. Occasionally Dennir ran into someone that was offended by something he’d say, and he addressed that on an individual basis. As far as the masses went, he was comfortable saying whatever was on his mind, at all times. After all, he was teaching the fundamentals of philosophy.
“Alright. So. Here’s what I think, and you can tell me if I’m right or if I’m wrong like you always do.” Professor Dennir looked out towards his audience to make sure that at least some of them were paying attention to what he was saying, and continued. “First of all, I think Jaxson’s made some great points. Real intelligence definitely seems like it’s on short supply these days, and certainly within this classroom,” he chided them playfully. “For real though – how much easier could we make things from here? The supposed advent of AI took place not too long after what we now consider to be the dawn of the misinformation era, which puts it around…” he took out a whiteboard marker and wrote 2023 in the center of the space behind him. “You’ve got the misinformation era starting around 2015. You’ve got the AI arms race of 2023. Things settled down for a moment or two around the building of The Atrium by around 2028, where world leaders began to start working together in hopes that they could keep us safe from the implied dangers of AI – and I suppose, we now know how well that went, don’t we? By the time it’s 2030 only a couple years later, the internet is basically broken and we’re practically back to using pencils & paper again. Yet at the same time, we’re still pushing the need for more AI, more automation. That sound about right? Anyone want to dispute the timeline I’ve written up here on the whiteboard?”
Dennir took a moment to gather his thoughts. It was hot in The Two. It was always hot in The Two as far as he was concerned, but even more-so this morning it seemed. He grabbed a small towel that he kept on the back of his chair for moments like this and applied it to the sweat on the back of his neck and forehead. Then, with a shrug that the first rows could see, he just put it right over his short black hair like a cloth helmet, and continued to talk with his class. “What if it’s possible that the origins of AI traced back much further than any of us have previously considered? What if AI has actually been around for longer than any of us in this room today?” He himself was in his mid-fifties now, while the students of his class were anywhere between eighteen at the youngest and probably somewhere towards their late-thirties. “Has anyone considered that as a possibility? What kind of impact would that make if it was?”
Where Jaxson would have normally checked out of consciousness in the middle of a lecture by now, he found himself genuinely interested in what his professor was proposing, and rather that just be silent on the sidelines, he chose to participate for once. “Hypothetically speaking, I guess, AI would be much more established than we currently know it to be, if it was around for that much longer. It’d be like, fully integrated with society and we’d probably rely on it even more than we already do, wouldn’t we?”
“Mercy me, we have at least ONE student in class that is thankfully awake this morning,” Dennir said in his signature joking style. “Alright. So. We’re a philosophy class, yes – but I try not to deal too much in hypotheticals if I can avoid it, and I think that I can. Take a look at this.” On the image generator, he brought up grainy footage of a gas station that was taken in the dark of night. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, it was just a top-down view of its old surveillance camera, the kind that used to be in place everywhere on buildings, before satellites were around to cover it all. “This is just one example of a possible AI sighting from the past, but it goes back the furthest that I’ve been able to find so far. And believe me, I’ve been looking. Anyhow. Keep watching and tell me what you see. If you’re among the squeamish, then feel free to turn your heads away if you need to. You’ll know when that is, trust me.”
For about a minute, it seemed like there was nothing going on. The grains in the camera footage had everyone scouring what they could see from the image generator as it produced its visuals like R2D2 had done decades ago in the original Star Wars, only with more lifelike detail. Then from the bottom corner of the image, a figure popped into the field of view at the edge of the parking lot, looking like he was soaked by the rain and making his way running towards the window of the service station late at night. Once again, the footage seemed to revert back to being harmless, mundane, and ordinary – until it wasn’t. There wasn’t any sound for them to fully grasp what was taking place, but it appeared as if the running man had some kind of an argument or conversation with someone behind the window of the gas station and was becoming a little agitated. Soon after, he put a hand into a drawer that slid out to offer him something like a book of some kind, but as he went to take it, the footage showed another hand appear and take hold of the running man. What followed was absolutely horrific. After a few tugs of back and forth pulling, the arms from inside the drawer won the battle easily. The classroom gasped as they watched the running man try to resist the sheer force of gravity inside the drawer in front of him, to no avail. The students found themselves thankful that there was no sound accompanying the visuals as they watched the running man get folded, broken, torn, and pulled through piece by piece, until it looked like the arms in the drawer were dragging in a pair of coveralls with a face attached to them. The amount of blood sloshing around in the drawer had half the class looking away, and the other half on the edge of their seats like they were watching a Horror movie. The scene on the image generator was largely inexplicable, though it was obviously probable that the footage had been manipulated in some way. Jaxson was the first to point that out. “When did this occur? Are we seeing the actual footage?”
“Both good questions Jax,” responded Dennir. “This was taken sometime in the early 1980s as far as I know, and yes, to the best of my knowledge, what you’re looking at is what actually happened.”
“Well then,” Jaxson continued, “how would that be possible? And why would anyone do that?”
Dennir removed the towel from the top of his head and tossed it back onto the chair where he liked to keep it handy for himself. “I suppose the answer to the first question is brute strength, unlike any we’ve seen for the most part. Sure, there are all kinds of reports of people lifting cars off of other people that have been trapped in accidents and things like that, but all hearsay…legends…folklore. Things that we’ve probably come up with to comfort ourselves in case we’re even in a situation that goes awry, so that we never lose hope and have essentially programmed ourselves to believe that help is coming…that we’ll be saved in our darkest hour of need. This is the first footage I’ve personally seen where I can’t explain what I’m seeing…like, physically. As to why anyone would do such a thing, it’s harder to say. You can tell that there is some kind of dialogue or conversation that we’re missing out on, so who knows what was said or what could have motivated such a heinous act of brutality. To crush bones and separate flesh like that is no joke folks. It’s like passing a square through the circle hole. Permanent objects aren’t likely to just move through each other, you know what I mean? Yes, there’s a bit of flexibility with the human body, but not like you see in that footage. That’s sheer strength and will combined, pulling that man through the window’s drawer. You wanna know what the strangest part of it all is though?” Dennir asked to a classroom full of students that now seemed to all be sitting up bolt-right, and paying their closest attention to every word he said. “With the advantages of modern-day technology throughout the years, it seems like our friend in the drawer didn’t actually die that night. In fact, here – let me show you. We can search his image, and look – you see?” Thousands of dots popped up on a virtual map that was created by the image generator, all recorded with different dates. “Not only does he reappear in different times and different areas of the world, but we’re searching for a specific image. That is to say, the very face that you see on the generator is always the same one. It never changes, no matter what year you’re looking at or what instance he shows up in next. That’s more than fifty years of footage, with all kinds of different circumstances, different locations, different scenarios – but it’s one face, that never changes. If that’s not artificial intelligence my friends, then I ask you – what else could it possibly be?”
Kendra raised her hand with a question, and Dennir nodded his appreciation her way, encouraging her to ask it. “So like, if I’m looking at this the right way, I probably have two questions. One is about the timeline. Are we to look at this map – a map of the entire world – and believe he was in all of these different places over the years? Like, look at just one example – he was supposedly in Hamburg, Germany on Oct. 12th of 1993, but he was already in Sydney, Australia, on the following day on the 13th? I’m not even sure that math makes sense, especially if you’re accounting for time zone differences or the nightmare we all know as connecting flights. I suppose it’s possible that a non-stop might have made it there, and it’s theoretically even more possible because we don’t have the exact times stamped on these images either…essentially that turns a two day span into a full forty-eight hours if he was to have been photographed at the full distance apart on each day. But I guess that brings me to my other question. Why couldn’t this have all been some bizarre coincidence? I mean, it’s definitely strange, and I’ll give you that Professor – but maybe this is some weird internet conspiracy. Maybe people had photos of this guy, and what we’re seeing are photos of photos – something like that? Or maybe, because the software of facial recognition technology wouldn’t have been all that great towards the beginning of the timeline here, maybe something got screwed up there, and he’s been logged in to all kinds of different places by some sort of glitch that was never caught? I don’t know – but it looks like he’s basically never stopped traveling throughout the past who knows how long. It’s unlikely, but it still is kind of possible, isn’t it?”
“Excellent questions Kendra,” Dennir clapped his hands together with genuine enthusiasm, “thank you for paying attention!” He looked around the room for a couple of fresh victims. “Matt, Forrester, Sarah – you should all start hanging around with Kendra here if you wanna pass this course by the time the year is over.” Matt rolled his eyes. Forrester didn’t even realize that Dennir was talking about him. Sarah went slightly red at the insinuation she wasn’t going to pass the class without getting a little smarter. “Alright. So…” Dennir continued in his own signature style of real-time contemplation. “To the first question that Kendra had about the timeline and all that, I’d be the first to agree with her – it’s bizarre, but it’s not entirely impossible. I think we all know or have seen someone that has spent their days traveling the globe, whether it’s backpackers checking things out, or salesman etc. etc. – it does happen, and she’s right about that. It’s something I considered at first too. She’s also correct about these two questions she has being related to each other. In fact, I’d say it’s the real key to understanding that this is a real mystery as opposed to a mere coincidence. That man I showed you back at the gas station getting sucked into the drawer from way back in, what was it, 1983? What if I told you that’s simply the furthest back that I could trace his story? What if I told you this case is infinitely more complex than that?”
Jaxson and Kendra both said what they were thinking out loud at the same time. “You mean, what if he wasn’t the only one?” Dennir stood beaming at the front of the classroom, so proud of his students. At least these two, and just for today. It takes months to get to this level of interest and buy-in from pupils.
“Exactly,” he said. I thought about all the same things that you did. I thought about coincidences. I thought about technology. I wracked my brain about the fact that this man, for all intents and purposes, should have been DEAD, never mind showing up all over the world, post-mortem. For months and months, I tried to make sense of this one guy’s case until I was pretty much ready to believe that I wasn’t smart enough to solve it and there wasn’t enough whiskey in the world to bring me the wisdom I needed to figure it out. Then I realized the problem was that I was being too narrow with the scope of what I was looking at. I was way too zoomed in on this one case. That’s when I backed things out, and started looking at everything through a much wider lens. And when I was able to finally do that, I saw this…”
Dennir flipped the switch on his image generator, which showed the world map once again, only this time with thousands upon thousands of glowing dots, all in a spectacular variety of different colors. If it wasn’t part of such a haunting and strange discovery, anyone would have considered what they were seeing to be absolutely beautiful, if not outright awe-inspiring. “This is filled with another thirty-five cases of people that continued to move after they had gone missing, or were indeed, pronounced dead. I stopped at thirty-five because some of the colors seemed to start getting too similar for me to tell them apart, but that’s on me. The point is, I could have kept going. There are instances of this occurring all over the globe, and it has been going on for years and years and years. The only thing I can’t seem to figure out is why. If it’s a glitch, we would have been able to figure that out by now. If it’s coincidence, then same thing, some sleuth out there would have been able to poke holes in this theory as well. The thing is folks – no one is actually talking about this at all. Right now, you’re the only people that I’ve even shown this research to, though I’ve got meetings all this month with different officials in government to report my findings to. I’ll fully admit, I’m just about at the end of my rope in the sense that, I don’t really know where else to go with it from here. I think the next step that’s necessary, is to somehow catch up with one of these people in person, so that we can figure out what is really going on. That being said, if you’re looking at the map like I am, then you know that’s not going to be easy, even with the advances we have made with facial recognition & such. They’re simply on the move at all times, and by the time you caught up with them in one part of the world, they might have already vanished to another. So…I feel like, even with all this information at our fingertips, we’re still just pulling at the very first thread in a much larger mystery that is well beyond my pay grade. I just happened to be looking at some old found footage on my own time one day way back when, and fell into this rabbit hole by sheer chance. I don’t know that there’s anything to it. Maybe I’ve been wasting my time for the past ten years working on it.”
Like the universe surrounding Dennir was taking its cues directly from him somehow, the power flickered and shut off in The Two, just long enough to reset the image generator. When it came back on, the map had changed drastically, like the files being fed to the machine had been corrupted. There were still lights and colors, but it wasn’t like the map he’d shown his classroom only moments before. “Just a second everyone,” he said, “I’ll get this back online as quickly as I can so that we can continue the lesson.” Dennir continued to fumble and fidget with his personal computer, but couldn’t get his files to communicate with the image generator again. “Alright. So. We’re gonna take a break and I’ll get the tech department in here so that they can take a look and see if they can figure out what happened.” The students filed out of The Two and into the courtyard of the university, milling about and talking amongst themselves. None of them were too concerned about continuing on the conversation about the strange man in the gas station; Dennir was fairly well-known in the school for bringing up issues and ideas that were designed to make people think, but they never had any element of real-life danger added to them, and so why would any of his students have thought any differently about this particular story? They went about their business, and with there really only being a few minutes left in Dennir’s lecture for the day anyhow, the majority of them got ready for their next class instead of waiting to go back into his.
The thing was, this time there was actually a very real element of danger to what he was telling them about. Unbeknownst to any of his students, Dennir was ahead of his time and saw something that no one else had put together yet. He was the first person pulling at that first thread, just as he’d mentioned only moments earlier. What he didn’t know, was that not only would the tech department not be able to restore his files that afternoon, but that the backup copies he had made in his apartment were also corrupted beyond repair, and that within only twelve hours of discovering his work was all destroyed, Dennir was killed in an extremely nasty car accident as he drove to get more whiskey to console himself.
