Memories of Green #20

Galen finally gets his interview at Shin Cypher in the Memories of Green series but all is not as it seems.

 

Date – 03/06/2089

Subject – Athena

Interview finally went ahead. I’ll tell you as much as I can, a lot of this is really complex and I don’t know what to make of it. I don’t even know if they’ll like it being on here. Nevermind, it’ll all be in the paper soon enough. Here goes.

So I get up this morning, suns out for a change, just means the city looks dirtier than usual. I put on some clothes, get on the train and head toward Cypher. The place is even more dead than it was before. There are a lot more of those guys in suits standing around in the lobby. They look like they’re watching out for something, their eyes are practically boring into the girl at the desk as she talks to me. She looks scared to be there, she barely speaks to me as she takes my ID, no eye contact at all. I wonder what she’s seen in the past few days to make her this way? In the elevator on the way up to Gerome, I see two soliders getting out of another elevator and talking to her, she looks close to tears, poor girl.

Anyway, I’m in this office with Gerome, he’s even more nervous than the girl at the front desk. His face is a lot more weathered than I remember from any of the keynotes or press releases. He talks in hushed tones and keeps looking through his glass walls into the hallways as he speaks to me. I look around, follow his gaze into the hallway, and two guys in suits are staring right back at him. I’ve only been here ten minutes and I feel edgy myself.

Gerome tells me he’s head of the Athena project. The Athena is essentially a massive supercomputer, capable of processing vast amounts of information at once, and this day in age, when I say vast, I mean universe-fulls, all at once, every second. Initally, Athena was going to be used for browser streamlining. It would look at the entire web and root out anything that was trending in real time, and suggest it to users. It would do this continuously, every microsecond, any new article that followed the current trends would be processed, audited, and pushed to users within seconds. Athena would also look at a users emails, messages and blogs, it would log key words and browsing histories in order to filter the trends it found to suit an individuals tastes.

Athena’s reach was all encompassing, it was able to look at content, whether it be minutes or decades old, and archive it into trends to directly feed to users. The idea was to “Personalise your browsing experience”. Athena would do this for every single Cypher user simultaneously, every second of every day, and considering one in five people use Cypher-OS, myself included, that’s a lot of users. The processing power required to keep this thing running must be staggering. It’s crazy to think how far we’ve come. Its crazy to even think of a machine that can dynamically learn from our browsing habits, and our conversations, a machine that knows more about us than we do. I asked Gerome whether Cypher employees would have access to our data. He remained silent, and then told me the second half of the story.
My interview was initially cancelled because Athena’s purpose has been changed. The Administration have caught word of Athena and gotten hold of it, and apparently most of Shin Cypher itself, Gerome tells me. Considering Cypher have made the biggest leap in artificial intelligence in twenty years, its hard to blame them. Gerome says the official line is that The Administration want to streamline the lives of all patriots, to use Athena’s capabilities on all operating systems, not just Cypher-OS. The entire internet catalogued and analysed constantly, forever, for the benefit of America. A barefaced lie and he knew it. What are The Administration going to harvest from Athena? Locations of Anti-Patriots and Unregistered Immigrant blog posts? Our pornography habits? Hell if I know. Athena would be able to archive everything that we looked through on the internet in a microsecond, and learn from it. Something tells me the Administration isn’t going to use Athena to dispatch targeted advertisements or suggest funny cat videos.

[Elements of the above text have been marked as dangerous – Bureau of Security]

Before we left, Gerome showed me the work-in-progress Athena, it was the size of a room, hell, it was a room. People don’t MAKE computers that big anymore. It was odd, being stood in a room with a twenty square meter intelligent supercomputer, I almost thought the fucking thing was watching me.
Anyway, the project goes online in [Censored for your protection – Bureau of Security] and according to Gerome, its going be coupled with two other projects, he only named them, I think they were [Censored for your protection – Bureau of Security]  and [Censored for your protection – Bureau of Security], means nothing to me.

As I left the office, I saw two C.P gunships drift in and land on the roof of the Cypher building, their searchlights glinted through the smog onto the windows and into the offices. Certainly not the best place to work in America right now.
Anyway, I have to write this shit into an article, I’ve had enough of my “Vacation” in Washington. Night folks.

Galen

 

Memories of Green #19Memories of Green #21

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