rm -rf /
2020-07-10 / 1346-kr-19
Ⅰ
[justify]In the central business district of Aduraszna’s capital city, Raszeran, the coffee shops were open all night long, save for a short half-hour at around three in the morning for the purposes of cleaning and restocking. For Sari’ad, this was really quite convenient. Her sleep schedule in recent months had had her waking up at a time where almost everything else in the city was completely dead, and falling asleep right after dinner to the soothing sounds of the evening news telling her about all the numerous ways in which Urth was falling apart, which it seemed to be doing a lot faster all of a sudden.[/justify]
[justify]When Sari’ad sat down at her preferred table near the window at the Idunaro Café, she knew she didn’t have to place an order; they already knew what she wanted. And although something like a latte would typically set you back five russ, she had an agreement with the man that ran the place – she fixed their computers whenever they broke, which was frequently, and she would get coffees on the house when she visited, which was also frequently. As a computer programmer, not an IT technician, this wasn’t exactly her speciality, but nine times out of ten it was a password that needed resetting or a cable that had been jostled out of position.[/justify]
[justify]Still half-asleep, she checked the time. Quarter to four. Perfect. She could get in a solid three hours of whatever it was she felt like doing before ordering breakfast (with another free coffee, of course), and then heading off to her place of work, Caslun T. It was a fairly large info-tech corporation – at the very least, it was large enough to require its own office building in one of Raszeran’s many industrial parks – and dealt in what its beloved jargon-buzzword-corporation language would call “bespoke technological solutions”. This translated into Codexian roughly as “we will code a computer program for you”. Like nearly every prominent info-tech company, it had recently become a subsidiary of the Nordenpuntian computing behemoth, Cluster, not that she had noticed much change outside the slightly obnoxious font choices that had been imposed on them. They’d even been allowed to keep their name. Nobody knew what the “T.” in the name stood for, allegedly, not even the CEO, a rather boring old elf by the name of Narusz. One hundred and thirty was very much pushing it for a zrei elf, but he kept himself healthy through what was apparently a fairly unappetising diet of chickpeas, kale and sardines. He was old enough to have fought in the Great War, when the Morstopackian-backed Empire of Zreiru’a conquered its way across the continent of Borea, and once the War ended and all the Morstopackian soldiers went home, collapsed in a wave of revolutions. Narusz had fought in The Realignment, as the wave was called in Aduraszna, although he had never said for which side.[/justify]
[justify]Sari’ad plugged her laptop into the three-pin socket on the wall and opened the screen. It lit up with a photo of the Raszerani skyline at night, which she had taken while on the ferry to visit some of her relatives across the bay. In the bottom right hand corner of the screen, an animated icon popped up: the face of an androgynous zrei elf, in a traditional sci-fi light blue colour palette. The artist had even added horizontal dark stripes for a retro CRT monitor effect, even though people had stopped using CRT monitors decades ago. “Welcome back, Sari’ad!” chirped the computer’s speakers as the screen displayed a few frames of the face’s mouth opening and closing. It was a clearly artificial voice, and she preferred it that way, even though much better and more realistic speech synthesis software was available. Doing it “properly” didn’t really have the effect she was looking for.[/justify]
[justify]With an “oop”, Sari’ad muted the laptop. She hadn’t dug out her headphones from her bag yet and didn’t want to disturb everyone else in the Idunaro Café. Embarrassed, she took a quick look around the place and found that “everyone else” was, in fact, just Tsólnesz, the barista, who was busying himself with the overly intricate coffee machine on the other side of the shop. If he had noticed, he didn’t say anything.[/justify]
[justify]In the corner of the screen, another three-frame animation played – the first two were of a disembodied hand closing a zip that had appeared over the blue elf face’s mouth, and the third was that face winking, smiling, and doing a thumbs up. Sari’ad laughed quietly to herself – she’d forgotten she’d put that animation in. “Thanks, Russie,” she whispered, before realising she was talking to her own computer program again, and shaking her head. Calling the avatar “Russie” wasn’t even her idea, it was a friend of hers who had recommended the nickname after deciding that its full name, Rusnjal Itanrei (Vaaran for “computer assistant”) was too long-winded.[/justify]
[justify]And apparently, Russie had heard – or at least, the microphone on her laptop was on – because a “no problem!” appeared in its signature light blue just above its still-grinning face. Clearly, Russie had not yet been programmed to correctly interpret and process sarcasm.[/justify]
[justify]And apparently, Tsólnesz had also heard, and let out a quick “Pardon?”[/justify]
[justify]“What?” she asked, pretending that she hadn’t just been silly enough (and, to her defence, half-asleep enough) to talk to her computer assistant as if it was a living thing.[/justify]
[justify]The barista shrugged. “Oh, uh, nevermind, uh, thought I heard something.” Sari’ad returned with a shrug in solidarity and went back to looking at the laptop screen. The hissing of, as she knew it to be called from her many years helping out the café, “that metal tube thing what’s got the dial on it” steaming the milk, told her that Tsólnesz had also chosen to drop the awkward situation as quickly as possible.[/justify]
[justify]The coffee, when it arrived, was delicious, as it always was, and provided enough caffeine for Sari’ad to get on with her project for the morning, although she hadn’t yet figured out what it would be.[/justify]
[justify]Technically, Russie was not sanctioned by Caslun T. She was working on it in her own free time and was not planning to let them do what they wanted with it, least of all start selling it to customers for massive profit margins. But, she was using their datasets. Millions if not billions – she hadn’t counted – of interactions between real living people, mostly comprised of every single Vaaran-language post that had ever been sent on the social media site Pigeon, sat on a single two-and-a-half-inch hard drive, taking up the vast majority of its ten-terabyte storage capacity. It was a hard drive that she technically wasn’t supposed to have. When multinational megacorporation Cluster had bought out Caslun T. in 2017, they’d been very clear about exactly in what ways and for what purposes they would be allowed to use their astronomically large databases. There was absolutely no way that Sari’ad would have been able to clear use of every Vaaran-language Pigeon post to train a computer assistant that neither Caslun T. nor Cluster would be getting their hands on, which is why she just hadn’t asked. She’d had access to the databases for the purposes of training some algorithm that would decide what posts to show to people to maximise likes, replies and reposts, and she’d decided to make a backup. You know, just in case. Strip out the non-Vaaran posts and the unnecessary metadata, keeping only the date/time and which post, if any, was being replied to, and apply one of Caslun T.’s file compression algorithms that was optimised for the Vaaran language, and what used to be an extremely large archive file could now fit into a single array of platters that could fit neatly in her jacket pocket.[/justify]
[justify]The hard drive spun to life as she plugged it in to the laptop. With just a few clicks through Russie’s control panel, the program resumed sorting through the mountains of data. It was a very long task, and she might as well set it running in the background while she figured out what else she was going to do in the next three hours. Leaning back in her chair, she took another sip of coffee, and looked out the window, hoping for any flash of inspiration. None came.[/justify]
[justify]She sighed. That meant defaulting to the one task which there always seemed to be more and more of: assigning metadata and tags to the backlog of faces and expressions for Russie to use. It was a long and arduous task, but it needed to be done.[/justify]
[justify]Sari’ad was five folders deep when a thought occurred to her. Would Russie be able to do it? Not expecting much, she opened up the debug terminal. Ordinarily, she would load a simple input terminal and just work with questions and answers, but if this plan was going to work, she wanted to know what Russie was thinking.[/justify]
SARI'AD > Yes, I think so. Would you like me to do that?
SARI'AD > Task complete. Results shown in new file browser window.
[justify]Excitedly, Sari’ad took a look through the shiny new files. What had previously been called just by the date and time they were created now had file names that actually matched the emotion on the face. The metadata, which normally would have to be typed out by hand for each and every image, had been all sorted, and in the exact type of formatting that she needed. She could even tell that Russie had learned the metadata syntax from looking at the files she had tagged herself – assigning the frame number of an animation before assigning which animation it was a part of only made sense if you had the exact type of workflow that Sari’ad did, and Russie had picked up on that habit and was repeating it.[/justify]
In the back of her mind, she felt a little unsettled. She’d been working on Russie for only a few months, and it was already outperforming her. Where would they go from there?
