Teaser # 5 - Give a liver, take a heart

[Cicadan]

The University of Cascadia boasted the second largest campus dining facility in the United States, and additionally the fourth. The latter had a lovely view of the placid waters of the Sound, and had the worse dinner options with a universally reviled dessert rotation that was the stuff of campus legend. The former was a three story affair sharing real estate with the expansive building hosting the social sciences departments: a central plaza sharing a skyline with the outside world through a plexiglass roof, a set of farmer’s market-esque booths sprawling over the ground floor with seating options overlooking via the mezzanines on each floor above.

On the third floor a small number of professors kept their offices, with windows keeping them accountable to the student crowds below.

She always offered office hours informally when the lights in her office were on. Students would stream in and out on occasion- she mostly offered courses and advisory for graduates, so would-be pilgrims to her office were limited in number. She was often gone on various formal engagements, conferences, and the sort, but her phone was always available when she was not in person. To students she was a good deal kinder than to her peers in her other job.

The stakes, after all, were orders of magnitude different.

Professor Adhiarja, Director of the Neurology Department elevated to the position within the past two years after a department shakeup. Her office was spartan and clean, with no discernable bits of personality or nationality, and she only occasionally dipped into her native bahasa when calling home.

She watched the students below through her window, the cafeteria teeming at the peak of lunch rush hour as the gray cotton above promised rainfall within the hour. Footfalls discordant in their abundance, a localized earthquake barely felt through the soles of her dress shoes. Her eyes tracked individual faces easily, and read lips. She was privy to snippets of conversation without being known as a part of the conversation. Some strange narrative evolved live in her head with the speed of the court stenographer, something monstrosity of who slept with whom and video games with too many microtransactions.

“But the fix would theoretically be ready in time for Survival of the Fittest, is the team’s assumption.”

Garuda glanced back, attention wrested from the window, and she briefly considered her peer. A man with warm sepia skin, several inches her superior in height, several publications her inferior in credentials. Flint considered the topic at hand coolly over a cup of coffee, stolen from the student’s domain just before the downstairs cacophony had begun in earnest.

“The ability of the project to supersede expectations in testing last time was by an order of magnitude.” Flint crunched his nose in mild, civilized distaste.

“The virulence, yes. I’ve read the report.” Garuda used only one tone regardless of her mood- divining her impassive body language was a feat reserved for the modern Nostradamus. Finch inclined his head in an unspoken apology.

“Right, I won’t repeat what you already know.” A brief pause. “Have you seen the debrief from Fournier?”

“That I haven’t looked at yet.” She blinked once, and then not again for a good while.

“The two of you didn’t get along, yep. Which is weird, I suppose, I figured he was one of the only people here who liked talking about the meta as much as you do.” Flint shrugged, the badge around his neck mostly buried under a thick turtleneck adjusting in time to his shoulders. “Both of you took this job that seriously anyway.”

“That we did,” Garuda admitted soberly. “But we saw the endpoints quite differently. I guess that’s why he’s gone now.”

“That’s one way of putting it. What a mess.” Flint raised an eyebrow. “That’s what cynicism gets you.”

“I pride myself on being an optimist.”

“Your expectations for your team are about that sky high.” Both Garuda and Flint could smile some at that, shared for a brief moment but desynchronized so Garuda started and stopped smiling first.

Garuda never expressed disappointment openly, of course, but her exacting and precise standards were like flipping a switch on the ocean tide- the flat footed drowned. Garuda’s preferred method of high turnover was impossible given the labyrinth of security clearances needed to even talk to her, but of the dozens of associate researchers involved with the core of SOTF, only Flint had survived in her good graces past the two month mark.

“And for you.” Garuda scried her friend over the lip of his cup, which was kissing the tip of his nose as he took a moment for straight-serve caffeine.

“I’ve been around long enough to know when I’m not up to par.” Garuda nodded in full agreement. No contesting that he was indeed always there. The moment he stopped doing so he would be gone. If not in employment then in blood price. “So, Vermiculus then.” Exacting timing, even for the beats of a conversation.

“Yes. The adjustments on the resilience of growth potential didn’t go as expected.” Garuda mused for a moment. “Kessel was clever with this one, but I saw it coming. The way the prune clarifies and creates space for further development is elegant. Inspired, really.”

“It seems odd that it could be so simple, really.” Flint paused, then raised an eyebrow as he caught his own mistake. Again, with timing almost baroque.

“It’s a memetic model of generation. Simplicity is the point.”

That led both pairs of eyes to tilt back the way of the view of the lunch-busy hall down below, Garuda’s first, then Flint’s. Flesh in its varying states ebbed and flowed, individual droplets of humanity reactive to the presence of the other, surging forward, splashing back. It seemed tousled hair was back in, as every fourth girl wore their particular shade of black or blonde or brunette like they were holding up a mirror to the girl a table away with the dome of their skull.

“Did you know they still release episodes of the Gundam animation?” Flint eventually weighed in with that, a full minute of silence later, all while his eyes still picked individual thread counts off the undergraduate’s sweaters.

“That existed when I was a child. I’m a bit surprised it’s still relevant.”

“Like a feature of collective consciousness. When you think of giant robots the first things you think of are Japan and the Gundam franchise.” Flint worked with his conclusion slowly and cautiously, like his hands to the bits and pieces that constituted their project in its mundane glory.

“From a simple template many things are emergent. Similar but not the same. We’ve come… close-ish to proving that is how thought as a whole works.” Flint stopped speaking, expecting Garuda to take over with her thoughts. It took her a moment longer than usual.

“As close as we can, but it’s still as up in the air as ever.”

A surge of noise from below. Organic. Scanning through the soup of aggregate human body parts there was no epicenter to the shock. Random motion, a ripple turned to wave. Nobody within the crowd looked at any other bit of flotsam within it, everyone was just a bit too loud within their own unit of humanity to tell that another had become a bit too loud, that in total they were a cacophony, lasting a few moments, dissipating as randomly as it had occurred.

“I’m not a fan,” Flint sighed, exhaling in a flat monotone. “You’re better at getting meaningful things out of something that’s incomplete.”

“Not incomplete, but that’s where we tend to disagree.” Disagreement, she didn’t mind. Garuda tended to welcome it. She examined the single sheet of paper on her desk. Classified. Because it belonged to a student, and she was a stickler for protecting student privacy. Her full legal name sat innocuously in red ink on one corner, replete with a spider’s web of her critique and suggestions.

“In development,” she concluded, lazily raising her eyebrow at her compatriot, who offered an emotionless thumbs up.

“Right.” Flint. “Well in that case the rate of spread has to be a work in progress. It’s almost… too quick, isn’t it?”

“We’ll have a larger population this time.” Garuda had just learned today- she generally wasn’t particularly privy to things out of her narrow scope of focus unless she had to be. Of the heads of research- Sycamore, Finch, Leander, Garuda kept the most to herself. Anything she didn’t need to know she preferred to keep out of sight and out of mind. Flint murmured, a mote of disappointment. His research was parallel to the SOTF project- he quietly hated the points where they intersected. The two of them shared that mentality in common.

Not necessarily for reasons of morality- which is why neither of them had a true ally in Finch. They had agreed at some point that faces could blend into a crowd, liquify. What neither of them liked was the lack of purpose.

There was a thin line between necessity and cruelty.

“So we’ll see how self-limiting the expected feedback loop will be then. But I imagine it could get pretty out of hand.”

“Our funding is counting on things going wrong,” Garuda riposted dispassionately.

Flint was silent for a moment, then nodded with sureness that made the motion brief as need be.

“Something will emerge from the mess. We figure it out, we implement it.”

“I remember you saying once,” Garuda swerved the conversation, a casual leer in her eye reserved for a couple of young men poking the air with chopsticks in a fiery debate over some unheard, irrelevant topic. “That you were sure there was an upper limit to what we could accomplish with Vermiculus.”

It had been a year ago, hardly. The benefit of the sort of project that could build itself with the same sort of curiosity and attentiveness that its handlers could.

“Do you still think that?”

“I.” Flint had stopped watching the crowd, now his eyes were dedicated strictly to his superior. His gaze fell on the top of the bridge of her nose, a trick that made it look like someone was looking at you without actually making eye contact.

“I don’t think so.” Flint concluded simply. “We have fail safes, of course, but I imagine with the rate of virulence this time around things could get out of hand within a day or two.” Garuda smiled at that, the sort of tiny smile that was more a ghostly waning slice of moon of lip thinned until it almost pressed down a dimension.

“You’re giving us a lot of credit there.”

“More than Sycamore is ever willing to publicly give us, Garuta.”

She didn’t even flinch. She was used to it.

“I will give him this, he got that to stick much better than I ever expected he would.”

Certain things took on a life of their own, after all. Given the right timing, the right energy. Fed just right.

[Cicadan]

Dr. Jay Garuda
Project Lead - [CLASSIFIED]

Name: Yosinta Adhiarja
Pseudonym: Jay Garuda
Age: 37
Gender: Female
Alma Mater: University of California Los Angeles, Honours B.S Chemical Engineering (2004); National University of Singapore, Masters of Public Health [CLASSIFIED]; [CLASSIFIED], PhD. Bioengineering (2009)
Research Interests: Global and public health, epidemiology, agriculture, political science, sociology, economics, artificial intelligence.
Previous Consulting, Patents & Other Employment: Gadjah Mada University (2005-2015); [CLASSIFIED]; National Health Commission of the People's Republic of China (2007-2009); [CLASSIFIED]; University of Cascadia (2020-2022)
Selected Articles: Authoritarianism As Needed: Where The Tigers Got It Right (foreignpolicy, August 2011); [CLASSIFIED]; Tracking the Next Epidemic (Nature, December 2015); [CLASSIFIED]; A Fool And His Money Are Easily Parted: The (Apocalyptic) Economics of Social Media (WSJ, August 2018)

Following the [CLASSIFIED] of former project lead [CLASSIFIED], Dr. Garuda was recruited on personal recommendation of the supervisory board. As dispassionate as she is highly motivated, she is considered the most stand-offish of her colleagues within the research team. As a scholar with significant connections to foreign governments and significant nationalist sentiments she is considered high risk and is afforded appropriate care and consideration, however she remains a global powerhouse in terms of her knowledge and development of [CLASSIFIED] and the project [CLASSIFIED] has made significant headway since her inclusion onto the team.

Dr. Arthur Flint
Project Deputy - [CLASSIFIED]

Name: [CLASSIFIED]
Pseudonym: Arthur Flint
Age: 43
Gender: Male
Alma Mater: University of Cascadia, Honours B.S Computer Science (2005); Peking University, Masters of Statistics (2011)
Research Interests: Computer science, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity.
Previous Consulting, Patents & Other Employment: Janus Hayes (2010-2022); [CLASSIFIED]
Selected Articles: Mathematics of Cyber Contagion (Scientific American, October 2016)