compiseverythng (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} compiseverythng) wrote,@ 2005-11-15 04:40:00 |
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Some story pieces
The Dark Years
The next morning Neil found himself walking into the Pentagon with Shelly. “Ms. Nickols the guard offered as they walked in, Dr. Constintine, and Col. Myers are waiting for in the Blue 37 Room,” handing Shelly a badge. Shelly and Neil walked straight through the guard station, not what Neil would have expected. As they walked down the hall Shelly handed Neil the badge. It had his picture. “When did this get taken,” he asked with surprise.
“Last night as you walked into the hotel,” she stated as if it happened every day that one was handed a badge with one’s picture for you which you did not pose.
“Well at least it’s not a bad picture.” Neil had been tired by the time he got to the hotel and had gone straight to bed; he had slept a little on the plane but not enough. Even now he felt only half awake. “This is all too fast,” he thought to himself. He realized that he had been flattered to be yanked to Washington by Shelly, but now he was having second thoughts. After traveling into the maze down several long corridors turning with the walls of the Pentagon they arrived at a small blue conference room.
The were seven men and one woman in the room, the plain wood grain Formica topped table they sat around filled the room. At one end was a blackboard that had a short agenda. They welcome Shelly and him. His program was running on a PC in the corner. “Mr. Lemon, congratulations your program is a remarkable intellectual feat,” a tall man said as he stood.
The next few hours were filled by Neil explaining his algorithm, the people at the table barely keeping up. Slowly the room came to understand both the power and limitations of the algorithm, but bottom line was that it changed the cryptology domain fundamentally. There is was still room for good crypto keys, but that room had been squeezed from the orange to the seeds.
Finally the meeting concluded, Col Myers addressed Neil and the room, “Mr. Lemon, your achievement is remarkable and like the God Father, I have a proposition for you. The work you have done here under DoD contract is classified. We would like you to continue your work here at the Pentagon. This is a free country and we are all proud of that, but your work will not be published other than in classified journal, and if you do not agree to work on it here, you will have to work in other areas.”
Neil sat silent for several minutes, everyone in the room looking directly at him. After the long pause Neil asked, “what would I get paid?”
The Col smiled, “plenty young man plenty!”
Awakening 1
Neil was finished with his testing. He had interactively checked out 41 different cell phones in the Wall Street area and everyone had a functioning neuron, his auto diagnostics had passed on a million phones already. However, they were no better then dead because they were not communicating with their neighbors in any consistent way. They were not organized into a higher order structure. Neurons, thought Neil, epitomize the duality of process and structure. The neurons were a structure all about process, but they did nothing unless they were embedded in a structure dedicated to processing something in particular. Now Neil would create his Ear on The Street. “This is the culmination of my vision,” he said out loud to no one but himself, “the vision I had first had when Dr. Rucker, showed me how disturbing the cellular soup could cause structures to form.” The key would be to create the “ears” around the phones of particular brokers. Brokers that would know about large trades -- must sells. Only Neil and his ears would be there first. “Getting their numbers, each of five target brokers had cost me,” he thought. He shrugged, “well it would have cost someone else.” he finished the thought out load, “for me it was a penny.” He picked up the cell phone, punched in the 15 digit activation code, and dialed the first number by hand. It was started. He hit enter on the computer causing the other numbers to be download and dialed. Each phone he pinged was now connecting in a dynamic structure with “neighbor” phones, together looking for trade information they would send to Neil’s phone and then to his computers which would buy the stock and then sell it a few minutes later at a profit. How many times a day would this happen. At least once every 10 minutes Neil reasoned. 50 to $100K dollars every ten minutes. “That is what we are talking about here,” he yelped!
In the network of cell phones where there had been passivity, there was now a purpose. Neil watched his CAPN monitoring screen as the processing network self organized. Each layer of processing forming around the natural neighbors of the targets. First there was the word recognition layer repurposed from the phone software, and then the context filtering layer, and then the relevance decision layer, and the buy message layer. Each call to or from the targets started a two dimensional computation, a cellular filter processed the words buy and sell and passed this off to a higher level operation which decided if this fit the criteria and if it did sent a message to the next level in CAPN which made a buying decision, sent a message to Neil’s network which then chose randomly one of his 500 offshore anonymous accounts – a pseudo person – to make the purchase. Before the broker could put in his order the price had ticked up an eighth or a quarter. Over the course of a year the broker’s customers would pay a little more for their “must buys,” and no one would notice.
And now one more ear was required. “For this experiment let’s see what we can find out about Dr. Bob.?”
Getting Even, not Mad
Neil had worked several hard years at the Pentagon, but the algorithm while easily the best had not been improved upon. The biggest benefit the pentagon was learning how to pick harder to crack codes. The cold war was over and many of the smaller governments were suspicious and stuck to one time pads that were hand couriered; they didn’t have that many secrets in any case. Nonetheless, the Pentagon had no intention of allowing anyone to know about Neil’s work, there had not even been classified publications. Bored, with no real challenged Neil and the other PhD geek he worked with turned their research inside to cracking securities exchanges. Their project was so black that no one knew what they were doing. Neil was making good money, more than the PhDs he worked with. It was as much the boredom as the frustration that he could not publish that caused Neil to go over the line.
“You now Sherry, I’m one smart fuck,” Neil announced to the call girl he had over. Neil spent a lot of time with Sherry, he made more than enough and recently he had started making more than he knew what to do with and so Sherry was like a live in girl friend, only she was getting paid. “No, really,” he added as she looked at him in surprise.
“Oh honey, I know you a very smart. That’s why I like spending so much time with you,” Sherry assured.
“Yeah right! And I thought it was the equipment.”
“No babe, you have great equipment but really if you weren’t so entertaining and fun to talk to you couldn’t pay me enough to stay around. Believe me there are plenty of Johns I would kill if I had to spend the hole day with um,” she added.
Neil rolled his eyes and wondered if he was being put on. He new Sherry was smart even though she had almost know formal education. He had domains of knowledge that he knew he nothing about. “Anyway, you know I a one smart dude. Well I got a plan. And you are going to help me and you are going to make a lot of money,’ he paused. “How about 10 percent, after all its my idea?”
Sherry looked at him puzzled, “and what idea is that? I guess it depends on what it is, but you want to pimp me its going to be fifty/fifty or no deal!”
Neil laughed, “Pimp! Me a pimp,” as he rolled in the bed. “No, I just need you to set up an brokerage account. It will be all my money but my name can’t be on it.” Neil want on to explain that he was going to do some stock trading but it just couldn’t be in name.
Sherry weighed the ins and outs and said, “Sure!”
Neil felt cheated. He had no academic career, he couldn’t tell anyone about his work. Dr. Bob had screwed him and not put his name on the early papers that were published based on his neural short circuit algorithm, and so he had no academic standing at all. He was a drop out. Such was the story Neil told himself. In this last year he started to hate his job in the Pentagon, it was beneath him and he regretted not just walking away when they made that offer. But now he had a plan to make it all worthwhile.
“Bill, I have an idea,” he called across the lab like the idea had just occurred to him. As usual Neil and Bill Wulf were the only guys in the lab. It was a shared computer lab but everyone else found other places to be. Neil and Bill even though they too could have skated thought life in the military industrial complex were either too nerdy or too dedicated or maybe it was that their combined E.Q was half that of their I.Q, but they spent lots of time in the lab just the two of them. Bill turned, “I have an idea you know what we need is more funding. Just think what we could do with a Cray.” Software jocks always wanted fastest computer so Bill listened even though it made no real sense. “I say we go real. We use the trade info we are getting and make some money for the Pentagon and buy us a real computer. If Ollie North can do so can we!” Neil had decided that he need to enlist Bill if he was going to make his scheme work. “They will never get it unless we can put a million dollars in the bank and show them we can do it.” Bill started back at Neil with a look of total disbelief. “We won’t spend the money but will never get any attention if we don’t do something big. We have to show them how valuable this technology is, we are sitting in a backwater and they don’t even know we exist!” Neil was activated now. He knew that emotion would sway Bill and he need Bill on his side. He went on to explain that they would setup a controlled account and everything would be accounted. After three months of trading they on insider information they should have the million dollars and they would drop it on Myers desk and finally get some attention. Later Neil would be amazed that Bill went for it but he did.
Neil and Bill worked together but Neil always did the plumbing while Bill did the decorations. It was no problem for Neil to make every seventh trade not show up in the log and to be executed in a different account, Sherry’s account without Bill being any the wiser. The bigger trick would be the factor of 10 accounting error so that Bill would not see how much money was really coming in until Neil would have a cool million plus in Sherry’s account and there would be a good eight million in the DoD account. He just needed to keep the transaction in hex pennies and he just needed at extra zero when converting to dollars. It was really too easy, like a magician conning the unsuspecting.
“You’ve done WHAT,” demanded Col Myers! He stood at his desk looking at the brokerage account statement.
Ending Balance: $23,344,337.53
Things had unfolded even faster than Neil had imagined, they had caught a bull market in the sweet spot. There was another $5.4M in Sherry’s account. Neil had almost shit as he watched the escalator carry their starting investment – the departments budget – up more than twice as fast as he had imagined. They had planned on running the scam for three months but they had pull it after two. And now they had shown the result to Col Myers and he did not look too happy! “Let me explain sir,” Neil looked straight in the Cols eyes. The change in Neil had been coming for a long time. In part it was hanging with Sherry, he was gaining street smarts, and in part it was finally growing up, and in part it was just what the fuck, he had gone over the edge and now it was about survival.
The Col blinked first, looked down, “go ahead explain yourself. Explain what the fuck you too have done here.”
“Well sir, I got to thinking about this whole Iran Contra fiasco, and I said to myself there has to be a better way to get covert funds.” He could see that this rocked Col Myers back. He new he had him, or he new he had him enough. $23M in two months was enough to turn the head of anyone in Intelligence. “You see I figured that we can setup off shore accounts and with my algorithm we can find enough sure deal trades to skim funds for covert operations. No more clumsy arms deals.” At this point the Col sat down to consider his options.
Neil had been in the Pentagon long enough to know two things. The greedy bastards would use what he had done, and two someone had to get in trouble. Neil counted on that being him. When the reprimand came Neil dutifully resigned. He was out. He knew someone at the Pentagon would figure it out and he knew that they wouldn’t do a thing about.
Neil moved back to California with $4M leaving Sherry with a $1.4M. He proceeded to use the information remaining inside information to make great investments that doubled again within the next year. Meanwhile Sherry overdosed on cocaine. Neil started on his next plan. Create an AI and get even with Dr. Bob.
Awakening 2
CAPN had been running for about three months and slowly it was starting to make regular transactions. It needed to learn and grow. It wasn’t an simple algorithm but a set of rules, but not strong rules, more like go in that direction there is food over there, hang out with people its entertaining and you learn things. Neil had placed the core “ideas” in CAPN’s higher level processing by favoring certain goals and information. CAPN’s rule had to do with trades, and must buys, and emergency transactions.
Neil would sit up in his tower in the morning and stare at the graphic representation of CAPN’s processing. Rolling waves, scrolls moving through the cell phone network. Each high def screen had a “ear.” Neil got great pleasure sitting there watching the smooth rolling waves move out from the center of the map. Usually the computation just settled down after a bit but sometimes it would grow, new waves would come out and reinforce the others, catching them as they slowed. Those were the buy orders.
Every now and then Neil would notice a wave coming into an ear from somewhere else. He didn’t know what it was, some bug probably, but it always seem to just wash through. The money was rolling in, and this was just the beginning.
The Dark Years
The next morning Neil found himself walking into the Pentagon with Shelly. “Ms. Nickols the guard offered as they walked in, Dr. Constintine, and Col. Myers are waiting for in the Blue 37 Room,” handing Shelly a badge. Shelly and Neil walked straight through the guard station, not what Neil would have expected. As they walked down the hall Shelly handed Neil the badge. It had his picture. “When did this get taken,” he asked with surprise.
“Last night as you walked into the hotel,” she stated as if it happened every day that one was handed a badge with one’s picture for you which you did not pose.
“Well at least it’s not a bad picture.” Neil had been tired by the time he got to the hotel and had gone straight to bed; he had slept a little on the plane but not enough. Even now he felt only half awake. “This is all too fast,” he thought to himself. He realized that he had been flattered to be yanked to Washington by Shelly, but now he was having second thoughts. After traveling into the maze down several long corridors turning with the walls of the Pentagon they arrived at a small blue conference room.
The were seven men and one woman in the room, the plain wood grain Formica topped table they sat around filled the room. At one end was a blackboard that had a short agenda. They welcome Shelly and him. His program was running on a PC in the corner. “Mr. Lemon, congratulations your program is a remarkable intellectual feat,” a tall man said as he stood.
The next few hours were filled by Neil explaining his algorithm, the people at the table barely keeping up. Slowly the room came to understand both the power and limitations of the algorithm, but bottom line was that it changed the cryptology domain fundamentally. There is was still room for good crypto keys, but that room had been squeezed from the orange to the seeds.
Finally the meeting concluded, Col Myers addressed Neil and the room, “Mr. Lemon, your achievement is remarkable and like the God Father, I have a proposition for you. The work you have done here under DoD contract is classified. We would like you to continue your work here at the Pentagon. This is a free country and we are all proud of that, but your work will not be published other than in classified journal, and if you do not agree to work on it here, you will have to work in other areas.”
Neil sat silent for several minutes, everyone in the room looking directly at him. After the long pause Neil asked, “what would I get paid?”
The Col smiled, “plenty young man plenty!”
Awakening 1
Neil was finished with his testing. He had interactively checked out 41 different cell phones in the Wall Street area and everyone had a functioning neuron, his auto diagnostics had passed on a million phones already. However, they were no better then dead because they were not communicating with their neighbors in any consistent way. They were not organized into a higher order structure. Neurons, thought Neil, epitomize the duality of process and structure. The neurons were a structure all about process, but they did nothing unless they were embedded in a structure dedicated to processing something in particular. Now Neil would create his Ear on The Street. “This is the culmination of my vision,” he said out loud to no one but himself, “the vision I had first had when Dr. Rucker, showed me how disturbing the cellular soup could cause structures to form.” The key would be to create the “ears” around the phones of particular brokers. Brokers that would know about large trades -- must sells. Only Neil and his ears would be there first. “Getting their numbers, each of five target brokers had cost me,” he thought. He shrugged, “well it would have cost someone else.” he finished the thought out load, “for me it was a penny.” He picked up the cell phone, punched in the 15 digit activation code, and dialed the first number by hand. It was started. He hit enter on the computer causing the other numbers to be download and dialed. Each phone he pinged was now connecting in a dynamic structure with “neighbor” phones, together looking for trade information they would send to Neil’s phone and then to his computers which would buy the stock and then sell it a few minutes later at a profit. How many times a day would this happen. At least once every 10 minutes Neil reasoned. 50 to $100K dollars every ten minutes. “That is what we are talking about here,” he yelped!
In the network of cell phones where there had been passivity, there was now a purpose. Neil watched his CAPN monitoring screen as the processing network self organized. Each layer of processing forming around the natural neighbors of the targets. First there was the word recognition layer repurposed from the phone software, and then the context filtering layer, and then the relevance decision layer, and the buy message layer. Each call to or from the targets started a two dimensional computation, a cellular filter processed the words buy and sell and passed this off to a higher level operation which decided if this fit the criteria and if it did sent a message to the next level in CAPN which made a buying decision, sent a message to Neil’s network which then chose randomly one of his 500 offshore anonymous accounts – a pseudo person – to make the purchase. Before the broker could put in his order the price had ticked up an eighth or a quarter. Over the course of a year the broker’s customers would pay a little more for their “must buys,” and no one would notice.
And now one more ear was required. “For this experiment let’s see what we can find out about Dr. Bob.?”
Getting Even, not Mad
Neil had worked several hard years at the Pentagon, but the algorithm while easily the best had not been improved upon. The biggest benefit the pentagon was learning how to pick harder to crack codes. The cold war was over and many of the smaller governments were suspicious and stuck to one time pads that were hand couriered; they didn’t have that many secrets in any case. Nonetheless, the Pentagon had no intention of allowing anyone to know about Neil’s work, there had not even been classified publications. Bored, with no real challenged Neil and the other PhD geek he worked with turned their research inside to cracking securities exchanges. Their project was so black that no one knew what they were doing. Neil was making good money, more than the PhDs he worked with. It was as much the boredom as the frustration that he could not publish that caused Neil to go over the line.
“You now Sherry, I’m one smart fuck,” Neil announced to the call girl he had over. Neil spent a lot of time with Sherry, he made more than enough and recently he had started making more than he knew what to do with and so Sherry was like a live in girl friend, only she was getting paid. “No, really,” he added as she looked at him in surprise.
“Oh honey, I know you a very smart. That’s why I like spending so much time with you,” Sherry assured.
“Yeah right! And I thought it was the equipment.”
“No babe, you have great equipment but really if you weren’t so entertaining and fun to talk to you couldn’t pay me enough to stay around. Believe me there are plenty of Johns I would kill if I had to spend the hole day with um,” she added.
Neil rolled his eyes and wondered if he was being put on. He new Sherry was smart even though she had almost know formal education. He had domains of knowledge that he knew he nothing about. “Anyway, you know I a one smart dude. Well I got a plan. And you are going to help me and you are going to make a lot of money,’ he paused. “How about 10 percent, after all its my idea?”
Sherry looked at him puzzled, “and what idea is that? I guess it depends on what it is, but you want to pimp me its going to be fifty/fifty or no deal!”
Neil laughed, “Pimp! Me a pimp,” as he rolled in the bed. “No, I just need you to set up an brokerage account. It will be all my money but my name can’t be on it.” Neil want on to explain that he was going to do some stock trading but it just couldn’t be in name.
Sherry weighed the ins and outs and said, “Sure!”
Neil felt cheated. He had no academic career, he couldn’t tell anyone about his work. Dr. Bob had screwed him and not put his name on the early papers that were published based on his neural short circuit algorithm, and so he had no academic standing at all. He was a drop out. Such was the story Neil told himself. In this last year he started to hate his job in the Pentagon, it was beneath him and he regretted not just walking away when they made that offer. But now he had a plan to make it all worthwhile.
“Bill, I have an idea,” he called across the lab like the idea had just occurred to him. As usual Neil and Bill Wulf were the only guys in the lab. It was a shared computer lab but everyone else found other places to be. Neil and Bill even though they too could have skated thought life in the military industrial complex were either too nerdy or too dedicated or maybe it was that their combined E.Q was half that of their I.Q, but they spent lots of time in the lab just the two of them. Bill turned, “I have an idea you know what we need is more funding. Just think what we could do with a Cray.” Software jocks always wanted fastest computer so Bill listened even though it made no real sense. “I say we go real. We use the trade info we are getting and make some money for the Pentagon and buy us a real computer. If Ollie North can do so can we!” Neil had decided that he need to enlist Bill if he was going to make his scheme work. “They will never get it unless we can put a million dollars in the bank and show them we can do it.” Bill started back at Neil with a look of total disbelief. “We won’t spend the money but will never get any attention if we don’t do something big. We have to show them how valuable this technology is, we are sitting in a backwater and they don’t even know we exist!” Neil was activated now. He knew that emotion would sway Bill and he need Bill on his side. He went on to explain that they would setup a controlled account and everything would be accounted. After three months of trading they on insider information they should have the million dollars and they would drop it on Myers desk and finally get some attention. Later Neil would be amazed that Bill went for it but he did.
Neil and Bill worked together but Neil always did the plumbing while Bill did the decorations. It was no problem for Neil to make every seventh trade not show up in the log and to be executed in a different account, Sherry’s account without Bill being any the wiser. The bigger trick would be the factor of 10 accounting error so that Bill would not see how much money was really coming in until Neil would have a cool million plus in Sherry’s account and there would be a good eight million in the DoD account. He just needed to keep the transaction in hex pennies and he just needed at extra zero when converting to dollars. It was really too easy, like a magician conning the unsuspecting.
“You’ve done WHAT,” demanded Col Myers! He stood at his desk looking at the brokerage account statement.
Ending Balance: $23,344,337.53
Things had unfolded even faster than Neil had imagined, they had caught a bull market in the sweet spot. There was another $5.4M in Sherry’s account. Neil had almost shit as he watched the escalator carry their starting investment – the departments budget – up more than twice as fast as he had imagined. They had planned on running the scam for three months but they had pull it after two. And now they had shown the result to Col Myers and he did not look too happy! “Let me explain sir,” Neil looked straight in the Cols eyes. The change in Neil had been coming for a long time. In part it was hanging with Sherry, he was gaining street smarts, and in part it was finally growing up, and in part it was just what the fuck, he had gone over the edge and now it was about survival.
The Col blinked first, looked down, “go ahead explain yourself. Explain what the fuck you too have done here.”
“Well sir, I got to thinking about this whole Iran Contra fiasco, and I said to myself there has to be a better way to get covert funds.” He could see that this rocked Col Myers back. He new he had him, or he new he had him enough. $23M in two months was enough to turn the head of anyone in Intelligence. “You see I figured that we can setup off shore accounts and with my algorithm we can find enough sure deal trades to skim funds for covert operations. No more clumsy arms deals.” At this point the Col sat down to consider his options.
Neil had been in the Pentagon long enough to know two things. The greedy bastards would use what he had done, and two someone had to get in trouble. Neil counted on that being him. When the reprimand came Neil dutifully resigned. He was out. He knew someone at the Pentagon would figure it out and he knew that they wouldn’t do a thing about.
Neil moved back to California with $4M leaving Sherry with a $1.4M. He proceeded to use the information remaining inside information to make great investments that doubled again within the next year. Meanwhile Sherry overdosed on cocaine. Neil started on his next plan. Create an AI and get even with Dr. Bob.
Awakening 2
CAPN had been running for about three months and slowly it was starting to make regular transactions. It needed to learn and grow. It wasn’t an simple algorithm but a set of rules, but not strong rules, more like go in that direction there is food over there, hang out with people its entertaining and you learn things. Neil had placed the core “ideas” in CAPN’s higher level processing by favoring certain goals and information. CAPN’s rule had to do with trades, and must buys, and emergency transactions.
Neil would sit up in his tower in the morning and stare at the graphic representation of CAPN’s processing. Rolling waves, scrolls moving through the cell phone network. Each high def screen had a “ear.” Neil got great pleasure sitting there watching the smooth rolling waves move out from the center of the map. Usually the computation just settled down after a bit but sometimes it would grow, new waves would come out and reinforce the others, catching them as they slowed. Those were the buy orders.
Every now and then Neil would notice a wave coming into an ear from somewhere else. He didn’t know what it was, some bug probably, but it always seem to just wash through. The money was rolling in, and this was just the beginning.
