Patches had changed the human race. They weren’t the only reason that humanity was able to start exploring the solar system and eventually beyond. But they were a fundamental stepping stone, taking humanity into a new enlightenment as much as the printing press had during its introduction.
It was a breakthrough in our understanding of the brain combined with the artificial intelligence industry that led to their creation. Doctors were able to map the brain with visual representations through magnetic resonance but that yielded a map of the physical structure. The electronic play between the neurons was visible but hardly reproducible.
That is until Harry Grainger had to deal with the problem on a more personal level. His son, Rusty, was suffering from a disease that prevented them from communicating with each other the way they had always been able. He wanted a way to interact with him throughout his inevitable decline. His work on artificial intelligence at one of the Southern American government run mega corporations (Post the “Northern State Secession”) and his idle work on trying to improve the machines that the doctors used to monitor and watch his son’s slow degradation of his mind combined into an almost maniacal obsession.
He began taking all the data he could obtain from the earliest stages of his son’s decline and worked on a way to translate it into data that could be utilized in an A.I. interface.
It is important to note that, up to this point, Artificial Intelligence was no more intelligent than the humans who wrote the code. It merely responded to specific input with a minimal predictive and analysis code to act upon that input. Its biggest advantage was its ability to consume large amounts of data and hypothesize on potential trends. Those trends were defined by the coded input, however. It was extremely fast and limited by its developers.
The equipment used to monitor the brain was similarly limited. It could monitor and display the data in real time and with great accuracy. However, the output was designed for a human’s limited senses. Visual images, charts, line graphs. Even when run through processing farms the results came back as human readable interpretations.
Harry developed a machine that would produce data in a format the would serve not as a human readable output, but as input as code for an A.I. His motivation, he later admitted in several of his later interviews and in his official autobiography, was not to provide a breakthrough for medical science and culture. Nor was it to tear through the technological barrier that had been preventing humanity from advancing. He simply wanted to create a method where he could have a conversation with his son again.
He achieved that. He was able to image his son’s mind and store the data into a large processing/hosting farm running out of Houston. He spent several years working on how to interact with the data. Building an A.I. to sit on top of his son’s mind’s data. During this work, Harry’s son’s health degenerated rapidly. His need to focus on this side work and his son’s health took precedence over his “paid” work. He decided to bring in a creative consultant from a large tech company to help him determine a way to monetize what he had developed up to that point.
He both needed the money to help Rusty get treated through the private medical doctors rather than the government’s inferior ones, but also to continue his work on that he believed would help to understand what was happening to his son.
Rusty’s pet rock was born. It was not the original name for the toy, but that was what everyone called it. It was marketed for a person to talk with Rusty while also helping to pay for his medical bills. Every dollar spent would go into treatment, development of the technology, research for a cure and helping to maintain Rusty’s family.
It was a simple clear crystal the size of your palm with a hidden LED screen that displayed words in clear text under the surface. It was powered by the warmth in your hand, connected directly to the global wifi network, like every other consumer device at the time, and was hooked into the A.I. interface that fronted Rusty’s scanned mind. You simply asked it a question while holding it in your palm and Rusty answered you. It was remarkable in two senses. It didn’t rely on keywords, if you were holding it, it would respond to you. It also wasn’t an answer from the internet, cold and calculated. Rusty answered you from his own natural manner with knowledge that he had obtained up to the point in time when his mind was scanned.
It was a window into the mind of a little boy who knew that his mind was slowly dying. It was devastatingly sad, devastatingly moving, and everyone who could afford one, had one.
Not long after it’s creation Rusty died. His father continued his work, creating A.I.’s for other’s going through the same disease and working with his son’s doctor’s on understanding the cause and finding a cure. His research and investment did finally discover a cure, but he had already changed the world.
Rusty lived on in his pet rock. His death didn’t remove access to his mind’s scans. It didn’t take long for two other types of people to want their mind’s scanned as well. Families whose children had incurable diseases wanted to be able to “talk” to their children as well. The arrogant and egotistic wanted their own pet rocks so that others could interact with them directly. Politicians and celebrities fell into this latter group often.
Harry worked with the families directly and discreetly. The more databases of minds he developed, the stronger the A.I. input became. He had an overwhelming empathy for the families as well and would do anything he could to help them.
He worked with the politicians and celebrities to maintain an income that would help him continue his actual work. They were trying to capitalize on their fame, he was trying to capitalize on them. With the increased revenue from the celebrities and politicians, he created a separate company that would handle the data gathering of “healthy” minds.
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Initially every politician wanted to be a part of the project. Memorializing the best minds of the country for eternity, after all, was a noble cause. It didn’t take long for the actual best minds to realize the level of corruption that was exposed when a person’s mind was laid open to unending and direct questioning. An adult mind was a lot less innocent than a child’s.
Both North American federal governments immediately shut down the processing farms that held all elected officials’ mind cores. Not before the true nature of the wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East and the corrupt nature of the partnership with the Saudi’s was fully exposed (not to mention the number of exposed extra-marital affairs).
The fallout of finding out that the joined American troops were being sent to protect poppy fields in Afghanistan because of the lobbying of pharmaceutical companies and their need for cheap access to opiates was immediate. The Southern states immediately withdrew all troops globally and the military audit and tribunals began in earnest. The Northern states still maintained a presence abroad, but the American empire building declined from that point forward.
The governments of the world had to step in to help sanitize the A.I. for politician mind cores, as people worldwide demanded that all politicians be scanned and have their minds stored. The governments could not have their national security threats leaked, they needed the mind cores of the politicians to be so ineffective that they would merely be propaganda sources.
The celebrities, in general, fared much better. Most celebrities had fan bases in their preteen and teenage years. That age group didn’t mind that their favorite singer/internet personality wasn’t an intellectual genius. The celebrity paparazzi had a new source of information though. They could ask very specific question about potential affairs and could determine schedules and potential habits that would help locate them more easily.
It didn’t take long for some of these mind cores to be sanitized as well.
The sanitizing process originally depended solely on what the doctors in Harry’s new company had learned and were learning about the human brain. They had to identify how to remove data related to interactions with specific people, dates, numbers, and, in the case of the politicians, very specific classified information.
They initially tried to remove large swaths of the data but found that the end results were generic and dull. Those results were perfectly fine for the federal security agencies who were ecstatic with a completely ineffective device for their politicians. It made the celebrities seem single dimensional and normal. That would not do.
The healthy mind core company still did business with normal people who didn’t want their mind cores sanitized. People who were on their death bed and wanted their lives known and extended to their children and grandchildren. It became the quintessential autobiography. As such, the company had access to unlimited funds and the brain specialists and A.I. experts flocked to work at the cutting edge of the industry.
They couldn’t get beyond removing the correct data from a mind core without also removing most of the person’s personality along with it. Harry Grainger passed away during this time, never realizing the full potential of his work. It was an intern from Vanderbilt who was bored at work one week who took it to the next stage.
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Every person working for the company was scanned yearly. The processing and storage industries had boomed with the consumerization of the mind cores. A single person’s mind could be stored within a single processing unit. It was small enough that nobody would ever notice if someone had scanned themselves several times within a day.
The intern, whose job was to scan people for their yearly, was in a serious downtime. Nobody was scheduled for the entire week and his boss was on Vacation. He asked if he had to come in to the office and was told that he was required to be there. His boss told him to “read a book” or something.
He decided to do just that.
Out of boredom he scanned his mind on Monday morning. He spent the rest of the day in his technician’s space alone, reading a Louis L’amour novel, which he enjoyed immensely. He scanned his mind before leaving for the day to pass the time.
When he came in the next day and looked at the two scans he had taken the previous day, he noticed something peculiar. The second scan was significantly larger than the first. That shouldn’t have been possible and yet it had grown about the size one would have expected to see in a month between scans.
Typically, he would have just blown it off as being a bad scan, but boredom got the better of him. He had only done the one thing between the scans, reading the book. He immediately took another scan of himself. It was smaller than the one he had taken the previous afternoon but was still larger than the one the previous morning.
He now had three scans to play with and, although he had a theory about the size increase, that last scan’s size had put it in doubt. It was a simple matter to hook the querying A.I. into each individual mind core. He could then ask them each the same question.
“Have you ever read The Last of the Breed?”
No, Yes, Yes. He had expected those answers.
He grabbed the book and flipped to a random page.
“What is written on page 81 of The Last of the Breed?”
First instance replied, “Do I seriously have to remind you that I have never read that book?” His sarcasm came through as expected on that one…
Second instance responded with almost a word for word reading of the page.
Third instance replied, “It’s probably around the time when he was trying to escape from the prison.”
That explained the reduction in the third scan. The second scan was taken when the brain still had all the book in its memory before it started being replaced with other more important short-term memories. This morning, he could still recall the story, some specific details that were important to him and the emotions that the story had drawn from him. It was not nearly as specific as the second mind core though.
He started an analysis/comparison of the first and second cores. Knowing that it would take all day for that to complete, he began reading another book, Asimov’s Foundation. At the end of the day, with the book finished, h scanned himself again. The analysis was still running so he called it a night.
The following morning, he studied the comparative data between the scans and found that the difference in data was centered around one specific set. This was not focused on the visual map of the mind, it was a difference in the numerical outputs. In the human mind the data was in multiple scan locations, but in the mind core, it was easily identifiable. His first thoughts were about how cool it was to be able to read a book and to identify what the mind core saw as the book’s consumption.
His mind wandered to one of his co-workers whom he had recently scanned. He brought up her A.I. and asked it two questions. Did she think the technician was attractive? She did! Had she ever read The Last of the Breed? She had not.
He took the data that was different between his first two scans and inserted it into her mind core. The co-worker’s core was able to quote pages directly just as his second core was able. He decided to ask her a question about a specific scene where the protagonist interacted with local Siberian villagers. The querying A.I. described how she didn’t feel like the Siberian depiction of a rural villager was accurate compared to her studies of that region during a summer abroad on a geological school trip.
This was an entirely different take compared to his depiction of the scene. He had been focused on Joe Mack’s wounds and how he would survive the next few weeks in a harsh Siberian landscape. Not only had the mind core absorbed the book, it had developed its own reaction to it. It treated it as if it was an actual experience.
It didn’t take long for the company to pursue test subjects getting scanned and then being asked to read a calendar, a book, have an interview, engage I a conversation with an expert followed by an immediate post-activity scan. It was easy to identify the data in the mind core that had changed. The desire was to remove those types of sections from other mind cores though. That took a little bit more analysis but was eventually accomplished.
A Senator’s mind core could have anything deleted from it (or never included in it). Scan before an activity, scan after, remove the difference from the publicly accessible mind core on a week delayed release. Government security departments were happy. It created several new job opportunities for desk clerks as a bonus.
It was several decades later that the genius of Ian Spark led to the advancement of inserting mind core segments into actual minds using the now well-known patch system. That is the traditional action identified as the beginning of the Light Age, although it never could have happened without Harry Grainger’s initial discover.
Ian Spark’s life and works and the story of the Patch Wars that followed is continued on the next patch labelled “Patch History IV.”
