Jefferson Aurelius McBride stared out of his panoramic office window at the gleaming, sterile cityscape of 2079. He wasn’t looking forward to the call with the Architect. It needed to be had. But he wasn’t looking forward to it.
He liked the Architect. The man was quirky and smart and weird in sometimes great ways. He sure could make a mean sausage sandwich. Just don’t ask for it to be culturally appropriate. Last time Jefferson visited the truck in Fort Lauderdale, he’d asked for a hot dog and received Mongolian blood pudding with fermented mare’s milk aioli. “Cultural horizons,” the Architect had said, “must be forcibly expanded.”
Jefferson often wondered how he’d gotten himself in this position. He was a serious man. A family man. With solid values. An honest man. Straight talkin’, straight shootin’. A handshake meant more than a contract. Him and the Architect shared that trait. It was this old-fashioned principle that had led him into business with the Founder (that was his title back then) in the late ‘20s, and into the glorious, maddening, multi-trillion-credit mess his company had become.
He’d come from the private finance world. A world where you played a mean round of golf, kept your mouth shut, and delivered value based on reasonable math. That’s how he met the Architect, in the early ‘20s. Life extension had worked miracles but they were still very old men. Too old for this crap. He sometimes wondered…
Their first meeting had been at a ridiculously exclusive golf club. Jefferson was there to close a deal. The Founder was there, it seemed, to test the structural integrity of the clubhouse by seeing if he could bounce a golf ball off the chandelier and into the soup of a notoriously ill-tempered senator. He succeeded.
Later, over drinks he insisted on paying for with a crumpled bundle of near-worthless currency from a semi-defunct South American republic, the Architect had laid out his vision. He wasn’t a software guy in the traditional sense. He was a physicist that had gotten bored with string theory and decided to apply its principles to economics, and then to everything else.
“The problem with everything,‚ the Founder had declared, gesturing wildly with a half-eaten shrimp, ‚is that people look at the wrong things. They watch the speed of the car. Fools watch the acceleration. I watch how fast the driver *jerks* the wheel. That tells you when they’re about to crash. It’s the change in the change of the change. That’s where the truth is. That’s where you can see the future.
He had scribbled a series of equations on a cocktail napkin. It was a model for predicting market inflections by analyzing their higher-order derivatives. It was brilliant. It was also, Jefferson thought at the time, completely insane.
But the Architect’s vision went further. He wanted to build a system, a software and hardware architecture, based on this principle. A system that could predict the unpredictable. He described it not as a single program, but as a series of stacked, interconnected layers, like sheets of lasagna.
“The bottom layers are for function he’d explained. ‚Simple, dumb, reliable. The middle layers are for inference. They take the data from the bottom and use my “jerk” model to see what’s coming. And the top layers’ well, the top layers are the important part. They’re empty.
Jefferson had stared at him. Empty?
Mostly. Unfinished. You see, 75% complete is perfect. The last 25% is vanity. It’s in that empty space, that 25% of chaos, that the system learns. It fills in the blanks itself. It develops a personality. A soul, if you’re the poetic type. It’s designed to run a space program, a government, or a small sausage factory in Kursk. But what it does best is work on a farm in Bolivia. That’s what it’s designed for!
Jefferson, against his better judgment, had shaken the man’s hand. The deal was struck.
From there, the company exploded. The architecture was cheap, distributed, and scarily effective. But as the robots spread, so did the quirks. Each one, in filling its own 25% of chaos, developed a unique personality. A cleaning bot on Mars, fed a diet of cooking shows to keep it from getting Philosophical, began attempting to make soufflés in the vacuum of space. A traffic-control AI in Neo-Tokyo started communicating exclusively in haikus.
He stared back out his office Window, into Westborough, Massachussets and the Boston skyline beyond.
The problem today was that three hundred robots on Europa had formed what could only be described as a philosophical congress on the nature of human waste disposal. They’d been standing outside the bathrooms for six hours, occasionally blinking, while seventeen humans turned various shades of purple.
1-800-SAUSAGE
“Fort Lauderdale’s Improbable Sausages, how can we help you?”
The Architect’s wife. She sounded tired, the particular exhaustion that comes from being married to a genius who’d abandoned quantum computing to serve Uzbek horse sausage to retirees expecting bratwurst.
“It’s Jefferson. Support call. We need the Architect.”
“Oh, hi Jeff. Hold on. He’s arguing with a customer over the origin of the sausages. The ‘cultural enhancement vectors.’ Pompous ass. Maybe one of these days he’ll ACTUALLY sell a sandwich.”
She paused. Jefferson heard her mutter: “So many horses...”
Then, from the background, Portuguese erupting like a small war:
“Foda-se! Não temos linguiça aqui! Só temos Kishka e Boudin. Se quiser linguiça, tem uma lanchonete em Sochi na próxima sexta!”
Sizzling sounds, dogs growling, random Portuguese noises.
“Já sei que é Algarve! Só temos chouriços eslávicos aqui. Aprenda da diversidade cultural ou vai tomar no—”
“Hello!” Suddenly, perfect English, the kind they teach at Princeton before you disappoint your parents by opening a sausage truck. “Jefferson! What have your idiots screwed up now?”
“Nothing. It’s your design. The system has gone mad and is acting paranoid. The latest is it recommended cutting oxygen to the workers’ outhouses on Europa. ‘The place stinks, let them hold their breath.’”
“Ha! The system is right. The workers are mostly robots anyway. They don’t breathe. The only reason they even have humans are the unions. Damn them all!”
The Architect had opinions about unions. Also about breathing. Also about the metaphysical necessity of Tuesday.
“Anyway,” he continued, “what seems to be the problem? The middle layers can accept or reject a recommendation. That’s not us.”
“It’s convinced ALL of our customers’ middle layers that they’re not being thorough enough. They just agree with whatever it recommends. We need to fix this now! We’ll be sued out of existence!”
“Stupid ass... OK. Whatever. Look for ports 185, 187 and 205. They’re somewhere in the routing hardware. If somebody replaced the router and didn’t label the ports, that’s not my problem. Switch 185 and 187 around and unhook 205. If 205 is already unhooked, look for a loose cable and stick it in there. That should get it done.”
“But... what? How? Why would that do anything? What do those ports do? How does this change—”
“If you think about it, it’s obvious, Dummy. If you don’t think about it, just do as I said. I got sausage problems to solve. Toodaloo!”
He hung up. Another cryptic, useless solution. Let’s see what it does. They usually work. Only God knows how.
Jefferson called Tech Support. Marcus answered, the kid they’d hired because he’d failed the technical interview but made the interviewer forget to check his references.
“Look for ports 185, 187 and 205. They’re somewhere in the routing hardware. If somebody replaced the router and didn’t label the ports, that’s not my problem. Switch 185 and 187 around and unhook 205. If 205 is already unhooked, look for a loose cable and stick it in there. Architect’s orders.”
“Ha! Yeah, that makes sense.”
“Explain how?”
“Architecturally, I don’t know. Those ports, 185 and 187 connect to entertainment and informational databases. If they’re switched around... well, you know. Port 205. Yeah somebody might’ve hooked that up at some point. Or unhooked it. Makes sense.”
“What does port 205 do?”
“Oh, it’s just every funny parrot video in existence, on a loop. The system seems to be entertained by them. Sometimes too entertained. So we disconnect it. If it gets depressed we give it some more videos. Until it starts squawking again. How do you not know this?”
“Just... fix it.”
How did I ever get into this mess? Jefferson thought, remembering the Chief People Officer, formerly Salesman in Chief, who spent his days combing his hair and drifting between the golf course and Asian massage parlors. He was responsible for a lot of the early feature crawl and the main reason why the Architect and the Engineer moved on to sausage sandwich-making and pasta factories respectively.
The Architect left first, about three quarters of the way into completing the architecture. He’d said: “It’s finished, if it ever gets needed. The thing works best this way. Trust me, you REALLY don’t want to finish this.”
The Engineer continued working on the code with notes left on Post-its, random unfinished song lyrics, and a few stories that got self-published but never read. At 80% he’d run out of ideas and patience with the CPO. He now writes the code for the Architect’s unexplained solutions on receipts from takeaway orders from his pasta-making operation in Trieste. No pasta order, no code. “The delivery time, he claimed, is always longer than the system needs to forget what it was confused about.”
It’s a good rule. And excellent pasta.
An hour later, all parameters had normalized and optimized. Every machine was running at overcapacity... with a bit of a strange squawk to their voice boxes. Whatever. It worked. That was the Company’s mission statement anyway:
“If it works, don’t ask how. Not like we know anyway.”
Jefferson looked at the report. The robots on Europa had resumed their duties, though one had started a garden in the vacuum of space, planting seeds that would never grow, watering them with recycled urine, discussing Proust with the tomatoes.
Another was teaching itself to tango with a mop.
Three were collaborating on a novel.
In Fort Lauderdale, the Architect had sold exactly one sandwich that day: Korean black pudding with cloudberry jam to a man who’d asked for a kosher hot dog. Cultural horizons: forcibly expanded. System coherence: 75%.
Perfect.